As everybody knows, the best movie that got released in the year 1933 was “Cavalcade,” Frank Lloyd’s epic tale of a rich British family living through the early 20th century.
No - wait, that doesn’t seem right, does it?
“Cavalcade” was a box-office success and it won the Oscar for Best Picture that year - but it’s been largely forgotten, while other films from the same year have stood the test of time.
So now that we’ve got hindsight to help us, let’s ask again: what really was the best picture of 1933?
In order to answer that question, 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
There are two 1933 films that routinely show up on critics’ lists of the very best movies of all time: King Kong and Duck Soup. Both appear on the AFI’s 2007 list of the 100 best American films, and they both rank highly on Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 list of the top 100 movies of all time. Duck Soup gets a few more accolades: the Marx Brothers also narrowly make the BBC’s 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films, as well as the National Society of Film Critics’ list of the best films of the 20th century.
Three other films get shout-outs, including the great musical 42nd Street, the Laurel and Hardy classic Sons of the Desert - and Jean Vigo’s short film Zero de Conduite, which cracked the top 100 on Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 survey of directors.
Here’s a list of 1933 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound (directors): Zero de Conduite (T91)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): King Kong (41), Duck Soup (60)
Leonard Maltin: King Kong, Duck Soup, Sons of the Desert
National Society of Film Critics: 42nd Street, Duck Soup
BBC American (2015): Duck Soup (95)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): King Kong (11), Duck Soup (32)
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 seven films from 1933:
(145) Duck Soup
(163) King Kong
(236) Zero de Conduite
(626) The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
(875) Outskirts
(900) 42nd Street
(999) Design for Living
General Audiences
Duck Soup and King Kong are the clear winners among modern-day critics, with Zero de Conduite a little ways behind.
But which 1933 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 1933, according to IMDB (as of April 16, 2020):
King Kong (76,216 votes)
Duck Soup (53,863)
The Invisible Man (28,364)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (10,919)
42nd Street (10,159)
Sons of the Desert (7,453)
Zero de Conduite (7,405)
Dinner at Eight (7,226)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (6,967)
Queen Christina (6,835)
Again, King Kong and Duck Soup are the runaway winners, but several other critically-acclaimed films also have some general-audience appeal: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 42nd Street, Sons of the Desert, and Zero de Conduite.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1933 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.)
Duck Soup (3) 149
King Kong (7) 136
Gold Diggers of 1933 (2) 118
42nd Street (3) 97
Queen Christina 91
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (2) 88
Zero de Conduite (3) 86
The Invisible Man 55
Little Women 43
Dinner at Eight 42
She Done Him Wrong 39
Land Without Bread 13
Baby Face 11
Sons of the Desert 10
Bombshell 6
I’m No Angel 6
Passing Fancy 3
Christopher Strong 2
The Private Life of Henry VIII 1
Six films get multiple first-place votes, and our scholars also love Queen Christina as well. If you only see seven movies from 1933, make it these.
The results of our survey are fascinating with respect to King Kong: it gets seven first-place votes, more than twice as many as any other 1933 film, but when all the points are tallied it comes in second behind Duck Soup. Why? Duck Soup is universally popular - nearly all our scholars placed it in their top three or four - but King Kong seems to be more divisive, with some scholars loving it and others barely placing it in their top ten.
We’re not sure why our scholars are divided on King Kong. The film does have a reputation for being racist, and without spoiling too much, we’ll see in later years that our scholars tend not to love movies that hinge on racist themes and caricatures. (Cough, cough, 1939.) Whether that’s the reason for the divisiveness here, though, we don’t know.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There’s no question about Duck Soup and King Kong. 42nd Street is clearly deserving too: it gets mentioned on numerous critical “best” lists, it ranks third among our scholars, and it ranks fifth with general audiences. We’ll also add another Busby Berkeley musical, Gold Diggers of 1933, a personal favorite of ours which was also a surprise hit among our scholars. This was a good year to be Busby Berkeley. (Plus, hey, Ginger Rogers sings “We’re In The Money” in Pig Latin. How can you refuse?)
That leaves one more spot, three strong candidates, and no obvious right or wrong answer. In the end - with apologies to Jean Vigo and Fritz Lang - we went with our scholars and gave the fifth nomination to Queen Christina.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1933 are:
DUCK SOUP
42ND STREET
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
KING KONG QUEEN CHRISTINA
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s obviously a two-way race between Duck Soup and King Kong, and either film would be a worthy winner. But Duck Soup ranked slightly higher among our scholars, ranked slightly higher on They Shoot Pictures’ all-time best list, and gets mentioned on more critics’ lists than King Kong. (And besides, this is our best chance to honor the Marx Brothers. We’ll get another opportunity when 1935 rolls around, but A Night at the Opera will have a lot of tough competition that year.)
And so: congratulations to “Duck Soup,” the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1933!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1934:
L’ATALANTE
IMITATION OF LIFE
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
THE SCARLET EMPRESS
THE THIN MAN
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1933? Who should win the Moonlight for 1934? Join our community and weigh in!
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