In world history, 1944 is all about World War II, but in cinema history, it’s all about noir. We’ve already encountered several great noir films along our journey - including Shadow of a Doubt, last year’s winner - but this is the year where the genre truly came to dominate. No less than three of our five nominees this year are bona fide noir classics - and that’s not including a fourth that wound up just missing the cut. But will a noir film actually win? That’s the question.
To identify the Best Picture of 1944, 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 genre gets off to a good start, because there’s one 1944 film that shows up repeatedly on critics’ rankings of the best films of all time: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which is about as archetypical noir as it gets. Double Indemnity makes the AFI’s list of the best American films of all time, and the BBC agrees; Entertainment Weekly also places it in the top 50.
Beyond that, though there’s not much: Leonard Maltin cited Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek as one of the best movies of the 20th century, and the BBC also honored the classic musical Meet Me In St. Louis as an all-time great American film - but otherwise it’s all about Double Indemnity.
Here’s a list of 1944 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Double Indemnity (29)
Leonard Maltin: Double Indemnity, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
National Society of Film Critics: Double Indemnity
BBC American (2015): Double Indemnity (35), Meet Me In St. Louis (80)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Double Indemnity (40)
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 eight films from 1944:
(148) Double Indemnity
(242) Meet Me In St. Louis
(261) Ivan the Terrible, Part I
(323) A Canterbury Tale
(482) Laura
(488) To Have and Have Not
(807) The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
(978) Henry V
Here too, Double Indemnity is the clear leader, followed again by Meet Me In St. Louis - but there’s also some love for Sergei Eisenstein’s Stalin-commissioned Ivan the Terrible biopic, as well as Powell & Pressburger’s Canterbury Tale and two more noir (or noir-adjacent) classics, Laura and To Have and Have Not.
General Audiences
But which films from 1944 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 1944, according to IMDB (as of October 2, 2020):
Double Indemnity (140,463 votes)
Arsenic and Old Lace (64,324)
Laura (41,893)
To Have and Have Not (30,415)
Lifeboat (25,982)
Gaslight (23,764)
Meet Me in St. Louis (19,960)
The Woman in the Window (13,705)
The Three Caballeros (12,046)
Murder, My Sweet (11,836)
(Ivan the Terrible is thirteenth.)
Once again, Double Indemnity is first by a landslide, with more than twice as many views as second-place Arsenic and Old Lace. A few notable films fall outside the top ten, like Ivan the Terrible (no. 13), Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (no. 14) - and Going My Way (no. 11), a film we haven’t even mentioned yet. In its day, Going My Way was a wildly popular multiple-Oscar winner, but it seems largely forgotten now, by critics and general audiences alike.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1944 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.)
Double Indemnity (10) 149
Meet Me In St. Louis (4) 111
Laura 90
Ivan The Terrible I (2) 88
Gaslight (1) 81
Henry V (1) 49
Lifeboat 47
Arsenic and Old Lace 43
To Have and Have Not 43
Murder, My Sweet 37
Miracle of Morgan's Creek 33
The Woman in the Window 27
National Velvet 25
Hail the Conquering Hero 17
Going My Way 9
Phantom Lady 7
None Shall Escape 7
Torment 5
The Children Are Watching Us 4
This Happy Breed 1
Double Indemnity completes the trifecta, easily winning our panel vote in resounding fashion. (In fact only one other film from the 1940s gets more first-place votes for its year: Citizen Kane.) Meet Me In St. Louis is second, with four first-place votes - and then Laura, Ivan the Terrible, and Gaslight round out a very clear top five. The gap between fifth-place Gaslight and sixth-place Henry V is huge - and surprisingly, films like To Have and Have Not and Miracle of Morgan’s Creek fizzled with our panel. (Not as badly as Going My Way, though: the erstwhile blockbuster finished dead last.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Double Indemnity, naturally. After that, Meet Me In St. Louis is also a lock: it doesn’t do as well with general audience (somewhat surprisingly), but it’s second among both critics and scholars. Laura also clearly earns a nomination, as the only non-Indemnity film to make the top five in all three of our metrics.
After that, there are three contenders for the final two spots: Ivan the Terrible, Gaslight, and To Have and Have Not. All three are worthy, but we’ll go with our panelists, who made it very clear what their top five were for this year. (Sad for Bogey and Bacall, because To Have and Have Not is one of my favorite films of the decade - but if I’m choosing between that and Gaslight, I’ll go with Gaslight too.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1944 are:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
GASLIGHT
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I
LAURA MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
No doubt about it this year: congratulations to Double Indemnity, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1944! Billy Wilder gets his Moonlight very early in his career - which is good, because Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole and Some Like It Hot and The Apartment are all going to have some real stiff competition in their respective years.
Double Indemnity is the runaway winner for 1944 - but what’s second? That’s a much tougher question. We’re partial to Gaslight, one of the creepiest movies we’ve ever seen, but the numbers tell us it’s either Laura or Meet Me In St. Louis. If Double Indemnity hadn’t come out in 1944, our best picture probably would have been Laura, the only other film to make the top five in all of our metrics - but Meet Me In St. Louis would have been the top choice with both critics and scholars, so we could have made a strong case for that one too.
Then again, a 1944 without Double Indemnity might have been an even more crowded field than that. Of the ten scholars who ranked Indemnity first on their lists, three of them put Gaslight in second and three of them had Ivan the Terrible in second - so without Double Indemnity, the first-place votes would have broken down like this:
Meet Me In St. Louis - 5
Ivan the Terrible - 5
Gaslight - 4
...with one each for Henry V, To Have and Have Not, Laura, and The Woman in the Window.
The moral of the story: Double Indemnity makes it easy, but otherwise it’d be a real tough call.
Anyway, onward! Without further ado, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1945:
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
CHILDREN OF PARADISE
DETOUR
MILDRED PIERCE
ROME, OPEN CITY
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1944? Who should win the Moonlight for 1945? Join our community and weigh in!
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