When you talk about the 1960s in film, a couple trends rise quickly to the forefront. This was the golden age of movie musicals, with megahits like West Side Story, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady. It’s also the time of the French New Wave, perhaps the most influential movement in movie history, with groundbreaking works by Truffaut, Resnais, Varda - and Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the Nouvelle Vague’s central figure.
Remarkably, though, neither Godard nor the musical genre has brought home a Moonlight so far this decade. Godard came up just short in 1960, when Breathless lost to Psycho, and 1963, when Contempt lost to 8 ½. And while West Side Story, Mary Poppins, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and A Hard Day’s Night have all earned nominations, no musical has won the Moonlight since Singin’ in the Rain back in 1952.
Will one of those change in 1965? This was Godard’s best year ever, with Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou coming out six months apart - and it’s also the year of The Sound of Music, the highest-grossing and most enduring of all the ‘60s movie musicals. Who wins the Moonlight?
To identify the Best Picture of 1965, 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
According to film critics, there are two standout films from 1965: The Sound of Music, of course, and Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. Most notably, Pierrot lands on Sight & Sound’s prestigious critics’ ranking of the top 100 films of all time; it also sneaks into the top 100 on a concurrent survey of directors. Sound of Music, meanwhile, tends to show up on more populist rankings - most notably a 2014 Harris survey that asked Americans to name their favorite movie. Sound of Music was the sixth most popular answer.
Here’s a list of 1965 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Pierrot le Fou (T42)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Pierrot le Fou (T91)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Sound of Music (40)
Harris 2014 poll: Sound of Music (6)
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Sound of Music (25), Dr Zhivago (95)
BBC Foreign (2018): Pierrot le Fou (74)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Sound of Music (24)
Pierrot and Sound of Music are both well-represented, but it’s slim pickings otherwise. We only found one other 1965 film that makes a “best” list: David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, which just cracked the top 100 in The Hollywood Reporter’s 2014 ranking.
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 thirteen films from 1965:
(64) Pierrot le Fou
(164) Chimes at Midnight
(441) Repulsion
(515) The Sound of Music
(523) Alphaville
(552) Dr. Zhivago
(637) Loves of a Blonde
(797) Le Bonheur
(853) Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(912) Simon of the Desert
(949) Juliet of the Spirits
(961) Red Beard
(1000) Subarnarekha
Pierrot’s the clear leader here, with Alphaville - Godard’s other ‘65 hit - also represented in fifth place. (There’s general consensus among critics that Pierrot is Godard’s third-best movie, with Breathless on top and Contempt in second. Sight & Sound’s critics’ poll has them in that order, as does TSPDT.) Sound of Music is near the top too, but a bit lower than you might think; it’s well below not just Pierrot, but also Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles’ take on Falstaff.
Also worth noting: Roman Polanski’s horror classic Repulsion, just ahead of Sound of Music in third. Polanski missed our cut in 1962 with his debut Knife in the Water, but his (feminist? anti-feminist?) sophomore effort fares significantly better, at least with critics.
General Audiences
But which films from 1965 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 1965, according to IMDB (as of April 10, 2022):
For a Few Dollars More (250,481 votes)
The Sound of Music (224,705)
Thunderball (115,575)
Dr. Zhivago (75,464)
Repulsion (52,442)
Pierrot le Fou (32,829)
Alphaville (24,849)
The Flight of the Phoenix (20,218)
Help! (19,723)
Red Beard (18,773)
Surprisingly, The Sound of Music is not in first place: it’s the 11th-most watched film of the decade overall, but it trails a bit behind Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More.
Like critics, general audiences seem to be lukewarm on 1965 as a whole, with only a few movies still resonating in any significant way today. Critics and general audiences also seem to agree on which movies still resonate: The Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago, Repulsion, Pierrot le Fou, and Alphaville. Those five films are all among TSPDT’s top six - and they also make IMDB’s top seven. (What about the other film in TSPDT’s top six? Chimes at Midnight fares much less well with general audiences: it’s in 30th place, with fewer than 9,000 votes.)
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1964 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-choice 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.)
Repulsion (5) 139
Pierrot le Fou (1) 113
Juliet of the Spirits 97
Chimes at Midnight (4) 93
Alphaville (4) 86
The Sound of Music (1) 82
Dr. Zhivago (2) 81
Darling 73
Loves of a Blonde (1) 64
For a Few Dollars More 62
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1) 38
Help! 33
The Great Race 25
The Shop on Main Street (1) 19
Flight of the Phoenix 19
Thunderball 18
Le Bonheur (1) 18
Red Beard 12
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1) 10
The Pawnbroker (1) 10
The Collector 8
The Tomb of Ligeia 6
Kwaidan 5
A Patch of Blue 3
Planet of the Vampires 3
The War Game 3
The Hill 2
A surprise winner in this category: Repulsion comes out on top with five first-place votes and 139 total points, easily surpassing second-place Pierrot le Fou. Also a surprisingly strong showing for Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in third with 97 points: Giulietta Masina’s comeback film got no first-place votes, but six of our panelists ranked it in their top three. (Pierrot gets its points in much the same way: only one panelist ranked it first, but it got six second-place votes.)
Everybody seems to be zeroing in on the same five films: as with TSPDT critics and IMDB users, our panelists put Repulsion, Pierrot, Alphaville, Dr. Zhivago, and The Sound of Music in their top seven. Our panelists also agree with critics on Chimes at Midnight, though it doesn’t fare as well with general audiences.
One other surprise worth noting: a poor showing for The Sound of Music, which finishes a distant sixth. Maybe not a huge surprise, though? We’ve established in previous years that our panelists aren’t too keen on ‘60s musicals: West Side Story, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady also scored lower than you’d expect.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
If we wanted to make it easy on ourselves, we could. There’s clearly a consensus top five this year: Alphaville, Dr. Zhivago, Pierrot le Fou, Repulsion, and The Sound of Music all make the top seven on each one of our metrics. But we generally try to avoid doubling up on one director whenever possible. Pierrot beats Alphaville on every metric, so Pierrot’s the choice if we only nominate one Godard film - but which other movie would take that fifth spot, if we dropped Alphaville?
For a Few Dollars More is the clear winner among general audiences and it fares moderately well with our panel, but it’s nowhere to be found with critics; in any case, we’ll be able to better honor Leone and the Man With No Name trilogy next year, with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Thunderball is the only other film that resonates at all with general audiences, but it gets no love from critics or our panelists.
That leaves the two films that scored highly with our panelists: Juliet of the Spirits and Chimes at Midnight. (The two directors, Fellini and Welles, are both in a seven-way tie for second with four Moonlight nominations.) Our panelists give Juliet a very slight edge on points and it gets a few more votes with general audiences (21st place for the year, compared to Chimes’ 30th) - but among critics, Chimes comes in as the second-best film of the year behind only Pierrot, while Juliet trails well behind. You could go either way, but we’ll give it to Falstaff this time.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1965 are:
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
DR. ZHIVAGO
PIERROT LE FOU
REPULSION THE SOUND OF MUSIC
With an asterisk on Chimes at Midnight, because Alphaville is really in the top five.
Notwithstanding the asterisk, Chimes at Midnight is Moonlight nomination number five for Orson Welles, breaking that large second-place tie: Fellini, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, and Billy Wilder were the other directors with four nominations each, and David Lean also gets his fourth this year with Zhivago. (Alfred Hitchcock, of course, is in first place with 13.) Interestingly, if we’d given Alphaville the nod instead, that would have been Godard’s fourth nomination in addition to Pierrot, Breathless, and Contempt - making for a nine-way tie for second.
Worth noting: For a Few Dollars More does not make our cut, despite being IMDB’s top-viewed film of the year. That doesn’t happen often: in the 36 years we’ve covered, this is just the fifth time we’ve snubbed IMDB’s top film. The only other audience-favorite films to miss the cut were Spellbound (1945), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and The Killing (1956). So far, we’ve never snubbed a film that finished first with our panelists - but we’ve done it twice with our primary critical metric, They Shoot Pictures’ top-1000 list. The River was TSPDT’s top-ranked film of 1951 and Wild Strawberries was first in 1957, but neither film got a Moonlight nod. (In Wild Strawberries’ case, though, that was only because we limited ourselves to a single Ingmar Bergman film, and The Seventh Seal had a stronger case overall.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
We’ve had a run of easy choices in recent years - Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 8 ½ in 1963, Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 - but this one’s not so obvious. We can immediately rule out Chimes at Midnight, which only snuck in on a technicality, and Dr. Zhivago, which ranks behind Sound of Music on every metric - but that still leaves three films that are about equally worthy.
You’d think Sound of Music would be the obvious winner, but the numbers don’t bear that out. It doesn’t hit as well with general audiences as you might expect, its critical reputation is good but not great, and it fizzled with our expert panelists. That panel vote is damning: Sound of Music finished sixth with our experts, and so far we’ve never given the Moonlight to a film that finished worse than fourth. The one fourth-place finisher to win was It’s A Wonderful Life, back in 1946 - and that film was the runaway winner on our other two metrics. Sound of Music doesn’t finish first anywhere, even among general audiences. (Another historical note: though Night of the Hunter and West Side Story both came close, we’ve also never given the Moonlight to a film that failed to finish first on any of our metrics.)
If Sound of Music is out, which film is in? The other two films in our top three are Repulsion and Pierrot le Fou, our panelists’ top two choices. Repulsion has a slight edge with IMDB voters, though that’s negligible if you account for IMDB’s English-language bias: as the top vote-getting (non-dubbed) foreign-language film of the year, Pierrot might actually have the more impressive showing there. Repulsion does have a sizable edge among our panelists - but Pierrot has an even bigger edge among critics, with a wide lead on TSPDT’s critical aggregate and a spot on Sight & Sound’s top 100. Plus, like The Seventh Seal in 1957, Pierrot also stands in for our other Godard movie, Alphaville. Either choice is defensible, but Pierrot has the inside track.
So: Pierrot le Fou or The Sound of Music? Pierrot makes Sight & Sound’s top 100; it’s got a big lead on TSPDT’s critical aggregate; and it also leads Sound of Music by a wide margin with our panelists. Sound of Music has the edge with general audiences, but not by as much as you’d think. The best argument for Sound of Music is that 2014 Harris poll, where Americans were asked to name their favorite movie and Sound of Music was the sixth most common answer - but that’s about it. Beyond that, surprisingly, Pierrot takes the prize.
And so: congratulations to Pierrot le Fou, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1965!
With apologies to Robert Wise, who keeps getting snubbed. It’s not really in the nature of our project to have many upset winners, but I think it’s fair to say West Side Story and Sound of Music would have both been favored in their respective years. (He’s not in bad company, though! Wise joins Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, and William Wyler as directors with three Moonlight nominations and no wins - though Dreyer would likely have one for Passion of Joan of Arc if we’d gone back to the 1920s.)
Recognizing Pierrot le Fou also honors Godard for his Pierrot/Alphaville 1965 double feature - one of the best years ever for a director, along with Leo McCarey’s 1937 (The Awful Truth/Make Way for Tomorrow), Victor Fleming’s 1939 (Gone with the Wind/The Wizard of Oz), Preston Sturges’ 1941 (Sullivan’s Travels/The Lady Eve), Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 (Seventh Seal/Wild Strawberries), Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 (The Conversation/Godfather II), and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 (Jurassic Park/Schindler’s List). Which of those years was the best ever? I’m partial to Bergman and Spielberg myself, but your mileage may vary.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1966, a year I’ve been excited about for a long time:
ANDREI RUBLEV
BATTLE OF ALGIERS
BLOW UP
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
PERSONA
Five great directors there, but not many Moonlight nods between them: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni get just their second nominations each; Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergio Leone, and Gillo Pontecorvo get their first. In general, 1966 is another great year for movies: Au Hasard Balthazar, Closely Watched Trains, Daisies, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf are just some of the classics that got left out. (One remarkable side note: with Virginia Woolf missing the cut, that probably means we will not nominate a single Elizabeth Taylor film.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1965? Who should win the Moonlight for 1966? Join our community and weigh in!
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