The American film industry rose to prominence and dominance in the 1930s and 40s, aided in part by the collapse of the industry in Europe: first fascism, then world war, disrupted an entire generation’s worth of European cinema and drove many of its greatest filmmakers to the States.
But in the early 1950s, the tables turn: while the continent recovers from war, the attacks on artistic freedom are now coming from the U.S., with Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare, Congressional probes into “un-American activities,” and the notorious Hollywood blacklist. Countless great artists, actors and writers and directors alike, are pushed out of the business, and those who remain have to toe the party line - none of which is particularly conducive to great art. So for the next few years at least, we’re going to see most of the greatest films coming from overseas - and 1953 is emblematic, with multiple masterpieces from Europe and Japan alike. But which one film from this year has best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1953, 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 1953 films that show up most frequently in critics’ lists of the greatest movies of all time, and they’re both from Japan: Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Tokyo Story in particular is widely acclaimed as arguably the best film ever made: famously in 2012, it supplanted Citizen Kane as the number-one film of all time in Sight & Sound’s survey of directors (and checked in third with critics). From Europe, critics love Max Ophüls’ awkwardly-titled The Earrings of Madame de…, which also cracked Sight & Sound’s top 100 as well as the BBC’s 2018 list of the greatest foreign-language films.
Not to be outdone, there are a couple of American films that win critics’ love too - most notably the classic western Shane, which cracked the top 50 on the AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list. The BBC left Shane off its own top-100 list in 2015, but it did include The Band Wagon, another movie musical inspired by older tunes in the vein of An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain - with Fred Astaire taking the Gene Kelly role alongside Singin’s Cyd Charisse and American’s Oscar Levant.
Here’s a list of 1953 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Tokyo Story (3), Ugetsu (T50), Earrings of Madame de… (T93)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Tokyo Story (1), Ugetsu (T67)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Shane (45)
National Society of Film Critics: Tokyo Story, Ugetsu
BBC American (2015): The Band Wagon (70)
BBC Foreign (2018): Tokyo Story (3), Earrings of Madame de… (58), Ugetsu (68)
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 seventeen films from 1953, a new record:
(5) Tokyo Story
(45) Ugetsu
(107) The Earrings of Madame de...
(230) The Band Wagon
(253) M. Hulot's Holiday
(287) The Wages of Fear
(405) El
(498) Shane
(563) The Big Heat
(574) I Vitelloni
(783) Pickup on South Street
(833) Roman Holiday
(845) Sawdust and Tinsel
(924) The Sun Shines Bright
(929) Summer with Monika
(970) Anatahan
(979) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Tokyo Story and Ugetsu are tops here as well, followed closely by Earrings and Band Wagon. But there are quite a few classics trailing just behind, led by Tati’s timeless M. Hulot’s Holiday and Clouzot’s harrowing Wages of Fear. Further down, we see our first entries from a couple directors we’ll encounter many more times in the future, Federico Fellini (I Vitelloni) and Ingmar Bergman (Sawdust & Tinsel and Summer with Monika).
And notwithstanding the Red Scare, Hollywood is still chugging along too: seven of these 17 films are American, including refugee Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn’s breakout role.
General Audiences
But which films from 1953 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 1953, according to IMDB (as of June 12, 2021):
Roman Holiday (129,649 votes)
Peter Pan (129,476)
The Wages of Fear (56,112)
Tokyo Story (55,237)
Stalag 17 (51,625)
From Here to Eternity (44,205)
Shane (37,892)
The War of the Worlds (33,233)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (32,601)
The Big Heat (24,331)
IMDB’s Hollywood bias is very evident here, as eight of the top 10 films are American - led by Roman Holiday and Disney’s Peter Pan, neck and neck in a battle for first. The next two movies are foreign, though, and we’ve encountered them already: The Wages of Fear, a film that was heavily censored in the U.S. for “anti-American” sentiments, and Sight & Sound’s number-one, Tokyo Story. (Our other top Japanese film, Ugetsu, is in eleventh place here, just outside the top ten.)
A few notable absences from the top ten here: M. Hulot’s Holiday is in fourteenth place, The Earrings of Madame de… is in twenty-seventh - and surprisingly, general audiences seem to have passed on The Band Wagon as well. Today’s moviegoers still flock to An American in Paris and especially Singin’ in the Rain, but the similar Band Wagon is a mere twenty-fourth with general audiences for this year (barely ahead of Al Bundy’s favorite movie, Hondo). There’s still quite a bit of overlap between critics and general audiences - seven of IMDB’s top 11 films also make TSPDT’s top 1000 - but we’re starting to see some divergence here, and that divergence will grow as we get closer to the present day.
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 1953 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.)
Tokyo Story (6) 133
Ugetsu (1) 94
The Earrings of Madame de... (2) 86
The Wages of Fear (2) 74
The Big Heat 69
The Band Wagon 68
Roman Holiday (1) 65
M. Hulot's Holiday (2) 64
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1) 61
Shane 54
From Here to Eternity (2) 45
Pickup on South Street 37
Peter Pan 25
Stalag 17 14
El (1) 10
The Naked Spur 7
Beat the Devil 7
The Hitch-Hiker 6
Gate of Hell 1
No surprise, Tokyo Story is the runaway winner here, with Ugetsu and Earrings in a close battle for second. Behind those three, there’s a tight pack with seven films rounding out the rest of the top 10 - led, narrowly, by Wages of Fear.
Our experts were also highly divided on which film was the best: Tokyo Story has the edge here too, but nine different films received first place votes, tying 1938’s record high.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Tokyo Story and Ugetsu are locks for sure, and we’ll also give a nod to The Earrings of Madame de…: Earrings doesn’t do as well with general audiences, but critics and scholars agree that those are the three top films of the year. Our fourth nomination goes to IMDB’s number one, Roman Holiday, which also made TSPDT’s top-1000 list and performed well with our expert panelists.
That leaves just one nomination left and a bunch of movies that could claim it. But one film does emerge pretty clearly from the pack: The Wages of Fear is fourth with our expert panel, fourth with IMDB’s general audiences, and sixth with They Shoot Pictures.
Thus with apologies to The Band Wagon, Shane, The Big Heat, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and From Here to Eternity - worthy contenders all - our five Best Picture nominees for 1953 are:
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...
ROMAN HOLIDAY
TOKYO STORY
UGETSU
THE WAGES OF FEAR
We said at the outset that this was a down year for Hollywood, and indeed only one American film, Roman Holiday, makes our top five - but there are numerous U.S. films that just missed the cut. It’s only going to get harder to pick a top five as we get even further into the decade.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It wasn’t easy to identify an obvious top five this year, but it is pretty clear which film is number one. Tokyo Story is the runaway winner with our expert panel, it’s in the top five with IMDB’s general audiences despite their American bias - and hey, Sight & Sound said it’s the best movie ever made, so who are we to say otherwise?
And so: congratulations to Tokyo Story, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1953! Several Japanese films have come close to winning - Late Spring in 1949, Rashomon in 1950, Ikiru in 1952 - but this is our first Moonlight winner not from Europe or North America, and Yasujirō Ozu is our first non-white Moonlight-winning director. (Though Oscar Micheaux would have had a strong claim with 1920’s Within Our Gates, if we’d gone back that far.)
Tokyo Story is the clear winner, but which film is second? That’s a tougher one. Roman Holiday is the winner with general audiences, but doesn’t perform as well with critics or scholars; The Earrings of Madame de… is critically acclaimed but flops with today’s moviegoers. The Wages of Fear is the only other film besides Tokyo Story that performs well on all of our metrics - but Ugetsu is the clear second choice with critics and scholars, so Mizoguchi would probably be our winner if Ozu weren’t there to steal the thunder.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1954:
JOHNNY GUITAR
ON THE WATERFRONT
REAR WINDOW
THE SEVEN SAMURAI
LA STRADA
(Welcome to the party, Fellini.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1953? Who should win the Moonlight for 1954? Join our community and weigh in!
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