There are a few years in movie history where one particular film stands out among all the rest: Citizen Kane in 1941, Bicycle Thieves in 1948, The Godfather in 1972, and so on. So far, we haven’t encountered one of those years - but will this be our first?
(Spoiler alert: yes.)
To identify the Best Picture of 1936, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
The silent-film era was dead and buried by the time 1936 rolled around, but the silents had one great last gasp with Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Chaplin’s masterpiece gets cited frequently as one of the greatest films of all time, most notably in Sight & Sound’s 2012 survey of critics and directors.
We found one other film that appears on multiple “all-time best” lists: Swing Time, often cited as the best Astaire/Rogers film ever made. Swing Time joined Modern Times on the AFI’s 2007 “100 Years, 100 Movies” list, and Leonard Maltin ranked both films among his 100 favorites of the twentieth century. (Maltin loved 1936 in film: in addition to Swing Time and Modern Times, his list also included Dodsworth and Mr. Deeds Goes To Town.)
The only other 1936 film we found on an “all-time best” ranking is arguably not even a 1936 film at all: Jean Renoir’s celebrated short Partie de Campagne, made in 1936 but not released until a decade later. (We’re counting it for this year, though.)
Here’s a list of 1936 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Modern Times (T63), Partie de Campagne (T90)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Modern Times (T22)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Modern Times (78), Swing Time (90)
Leonard Maltin: Swing Time, Modern Times, Dodsworth, Mr Deeds Goes to Town
National Society of Film Critics: Modern Times
BBC American (2015): Modern Times (67)
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies of all time, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes four films from 1936:
(48) Modern Times (131) Partie de Campagne
(385) The Crime of Monsieur Lange
(716) By the Bluest of Seas
General Audiences
Modern Times is the critical favorite, followed by two Jean Renoir classics. But which 1936 films do ordinary people still watch?
That’s a hard thing to measure; there’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film. So we looked at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. (You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger and maler than the average person, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.)
Here are the ten most-viewed films from 1936, according to IMDB (as of May 8, 2020):
Modern Times (206,251 votes)
My Man Godfrey (19,953)
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (18,920)
Sabotage (14,048)
The Petrified Forest (11,937)
Swing Time (11,740)
Fury (10,781)
After the Thin Man (9,039)
Dodsworth (7,668)
Reefer Madness (7,584)
It’s not close: today’s audiences still embrace Modern Times, but that’s it.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1936 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. We did, in fact, mistakenly overlook Crime of Monsieur Lange this year, and there was also quite a bit of write-in support for Paul Robeson and Show Boat.)
We used a ranked-voting system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
Modern Times (14) 191
Fury (2) 117
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town 94
Swing Time (1) 88
Sabotage (1) 87
My Man Godfrey (1) 81
Camille 47
Partie de Campagne (1) 46
The Petrified Forest 31
The Great Ziegfeld 30
Things to Come 30
Dodsworth 27
The Crime of Monsieur Lange 23
Show Boat 19
Osaka Elegy 12
The Plow that Broke the Plains 8
Night Mail 8
By the Bluest of Seas 7
Les Bas-Fonds 5
Bullets or Ballots 2
Libeled Lady 2
Charlie Chan at the Opera 1
This was the most lopsided panel vote of the decade, with Modern Times getting 14 out of 20 first-place votes. (Four of the other six panelists ranked it second; nobody ranked it lower than fourth.) Fritz Lang’s anti-lynching drama Fury is a clear second, and the only other film to receive multiple first-place votes.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Modern Times, obviously. We’ll also give a nomination to Fury, which took second among our scholars, and Swing Time, which gets multiple mentions on critical “best” lists. Mr. Deeds Goes To Town also earns a spot: it makes one critical “best” list, it’s the third-most viewed film of the year according to IMDB, and it comes in third among our scholars as well.
That leaves one spot for either Sabotage, Partie de Campagne, or My Man Godfrey - and since we’re just killing time at this point until we can honor Charlie Chaplin, we’ll go with our scholars and give Hitchcock the nod.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1936 are:
FURY MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN
MODERN TIMES
SABOTAGE SWING TIME
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
There’s absolutely no question, and no sense dragging it out with explanations. If Chaplin taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need words to convey meaning.
And so: congratulations to Modern Times, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1936!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1937:
THE AWFUL TRUTH
GRAND ILLUSION
PEPE LE MOKO
SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN DWARFS
STELLA DALLAS
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1936? Who should win the Moonlight for 1937? Join our community and weigh in!
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