We’ve reached the end of our second decade, and what an eventful one it’s been. Despite a brief dip in quality in the midst of World War II, the 1940s have brought us some of the most enduring, timeless films ever made. With 1949, some of our old favorites return, like Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Katharine Hepburn - and we also see the stirrings of new trends, like the emergence of world-renowned Japanese cinema, that will come to dominate the 1950s. But which one film from this year has best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1949, 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
In the 1940s, there was one pairing that was guaranteed to result in triumph: not Hepburn and Tracy, not Bogey and Bacall, but Welles and Cotten. Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten teamed up for three films in the 1940s, all of them classics: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and in 1949, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a suspenseful journey through a ravaged, corrupted post-war Vienna that still features one of the most memorably chilling villain reveals of all time.
But Europe wasn’t the only continent ravaged and corrupted by the war. Over in Japan, Yasujirō Ozu released Late Spring, a quiet reflection on tradition and transformation against the backdrop of the still-ongoing American occupation. Ozu had been a prolific director for over two decades at this point, but this is his first film (though not his last) that shows up on critics’ lists of the best movies ever made.
Nor was Welles/Cotten the only great pairing: 1949 also saw the release of George Cukor’s battle-of-the-sexes comedy Adam’s Rib, arguably the best of the nine films Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together.
Here’s a list of 1949 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Late Spring (15), The Third Man (73)
BBC Foreign (2018): Late Spring (53)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Adam’s Rib (34)
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, 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 eight films from 1949:
(47) The Third Man
(80) Late Spring
(234) Kind Hearts & Coronets
(630) White Heat
(777) Le Sang des Bêtes
(873) She Wore A Yellow Ribbon
(986) On the Town
(993) The Reckless Moment
Late Spring and Third Man are clearly the standouts, but critics also love Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Ealing comedy that gave Alec Guinness eight of his finest roles.
General Audiences
But which films from 1949 do general audiences 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 1949, according to IMDB (as of April 3, 2021):
The Third Man (160,200 votes)
Kind Hearts & Coronets (34,791)
White Heat (30,083)
Adam's Rib (19,639)
On the Town (16,199)
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (16,111)
Stray Dog (15,530)
Late Spring (14,855)
The Heiress (14,113)
The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad (13,521)
The Third Man is the runaway winner here, really the only 1949 film that still resonates with today’s audiences. Kind Hearts and Coronets is second, slightly ahead of James Cagney’s comeback vehicle White Heat (which also scored with critics). Our other critical hit, Late Spring, is in the top ten but quite a bit further down. (In fact it’s not even the most popular Japanese film of the year: Kurosawa’s Stray Dog has it beat by a few hundred votes.)
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1949 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
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.)
The Third Man (5) 145
Late Spring (7) 94
Adam's Rib (1) 70
Stray Dog (1) 67
Jour de Fête (1) 55
On the Town 51
White Heat 46
Kind Hearts & Coronets 45
The Reckless Moment 43
The Heiress (1) 42
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 40
All the King's Men (1) 34
A Letter to Three Wives 24
House of Strangers 10
Criss Cross 9
Whisky Galore 9
Intruder in the Dust 8
Le Silence de la Mer 5
Lost Boundaries 4
Border Incident 3
Twelve O'Clock High 2
(Pity poor Twelve O’Clock High, the lowest-performing short-listed film of the entire decade.)
Once again, Third Man and Late Spring are the runaway winners here, with Third Man easily outpacing Late Spring in points despite the fact that Ozu gets a couple more first-place votes. Adam’s Rib and Stray Dog trail in third and fourth - and then it’s a tight bunch behind, with seven films within 15 points of each other. Jacques Tati’s early work Jour de Fête leads that pack, but only by a hair.
And in keeping with our ongoing trend, this year’s Oscar winner, All the King’s Men, doesn’t do well at all with our panel. We haven’t agreed with the Oscar choice since Casablanca, and that streak will continue for at least one more year. (All About Eve will have a better shot in 1950, though.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Late Spring and The Third Man are locks, naturally, but it gets trickier after that. Kind Hearts and Coronets and White Heat both hit with critics and audiences, but not so much with our panelists; they prefer Adam’s Rib and Stray Dog, which are less popular with critics and audiences. Then there are two other films we haven’t mentioned yet, On the Town and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which score decently on all three metrics but don’t especially stand out on any of them.
Which of those six films get our final three spots? We went first with Kind Hearts and White Heat, the only films not named The Third Man that still resonate at all with today’s audiences. After that, we went with our panelists for the final nominee: Adam’s Rib is not only their top choice of the remaining contenders, it’s also the one with the most general-audience votes.
Thus with apologies to Stray Dog, On The Town, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, our five Best Picture nominees for 1949 are:
ADAM’S RIB
KIND HEARTS & CORONETS
LATE SPRING
THE THIRD MAN
WHITE HEAT
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
I tried to build up a little suspense, but it’s honestly not close this time. Critics and film scholars love Late Spring, but The Third Man is the clear winner: it’s first among critics, first with our panelists, and first by a mile with general audiences. It’s the fifth film of the decade to win its year on all three of our metrics, joining 1941’s Citizen Kane, 1942’s Casablanca, 1944’s Double Indemnity, and 1948’s Bicycle Thieves. Pretty good company to be in.
And so, congratulations to The Third Man, the Moonlight winner for Best Picture of 1949!
And with that, we can also crown Joseph Cotten as our top actor of the decade as well. With Third Man, Cotten has five Moonlight nominees to his credit, including Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Shadow of a Doubt, and Gaslight. That’s more than any other actor of the 1940s, including Humphrey Bogart (with four), Orson Welles (with four), Ingrid Bergman (with three), Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Stanwyck (two each), or Katharine Hepburn (with only one).
Likewise, Cotten starred or co-starred in three Moonlight winners (Third Man, Citizen Kane, and Shadow of a Doubt). Of all the actors I just named, Orson Welles is the only one who starred in more than one Moonlight winner - and he was with Cotten both times. Like John Cazale in the 1970s, Joseph Cotten was never the biggest star - but everything he touched was gold.
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1950:
ALL ABOUT EVE
IN A LONELY PLACE LOS OLVIDADOS
RASHOMON SUNSET BOULEVARD
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1949? Who should win the Moonlight for 1950? Join our community and weigh in!
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