The year 1966 was a tumultuous one, to say the least. The Cold War was at its peak and nuclear fears pervaded the globe; the war in Vietnam was already massive and only getting worse; anticolonial movements were on the rise in numerous countries; and between the youth movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the sexual revolution, the old traditions and castes and values and institutions were all being called into question or discarded altogether.
In the midst of all that change and uncertainty, it’s understandable that folks felt a little unmoored: all our beliefs and assumptions, everything we’d taken for granted, all the invisible things we based our lives upon, were being exposed as shaky and corrupt. What were we to live for? Where were we to find meaning? What was there left to cling to?
The great films of 1966 - and boy, there were a lot of them - all seem to have this theme in common. Set in times of conflict and turmoil, past and present, they take us into the lives of characters whose worlds have come unmoored, who’ve lost or rejected the things they once believed or were supposed to have believed, who are now looking for new meanings, new values, new things on which to cling. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed - and sometimes they’re ruined even further by their very success! - but they’re all united by that quest for an uncertain, nebulous, and possibly nonexistent meaning.
So, you know, not a ton of comedies this year.
To identify the Best Picture of 1966, 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
1966 is another year that could stake a claim to being the best year ever in movie history - at least if you go by Sight & Sound. No less than six entries from this year show up on their prestigious 2012 ranking of the 100 greatest films ever made - all of them in the top 60, in fact. The BBC agreed, listing four of those six films on their own 2018 list of the 100 best foreign-language movies of all time.
So what are those six films? Ingmar Bergman’s enigmatic masterpiece Persona leads the pack: famously described as Mount Everest for film critics, it makes the BBC’s all-time top 10 and Sight & Sound’s top 20. Not far behind is Au Hasard Balthazar, perhaps the most acclaimed film ever from critical darling (and three-time Moonlight nominee) Robert Bresson.
After that, we have three films set during various civil wars, past and present - starting with Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky’s challenging but compelling dissertation on humanity in a war-torn Russia. (Ripped right from the 2022 headlines!) Speaking of ‘ripped from the headlines,’ 1966 also gives us Battle of Algiers, a documentary-style film about the Algerian revolution made by the revolutionaries themselves; you’d think it’d be insufferably one-sided, but instead it’s a clear-eyed exploration of the necessarily ambiguous ethics of war. (Still fervently anti-colonial, though.) And the American Civil War gets its own treatment in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the triumphant conclusion of a trilogy that transformed the Western - and our conception of the West - forever.
Finally, Michelangelo Antonioni, last seen by us in 1960 with L’Avventura, is back with Blow-Up, an often-imitated, often-parodied, highly influential thriller that also viscerally captures London at the peak of the swinging sixties. (Blow-Up is also, I think, the most literal example of the connecting theme I identified at the start: nothing is certain here, from the dead body to the rock concert to the tennis ball - to our protagonist himself, who never really does find a thing to cling onto. Maybe there isn’t anything there.)
Here’s a list of 1966 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Au Hasard Balthazar (16), Persona (18), Andrei Rublev (T26), Battle of Algiers (T48)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Persona (T13), Andrei Rublev (T13), Au Hasard Balthazar (21), Battle of Algiers (T26), Blow-Up (T59), The Good the Bad & the Ugly (T59)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (67)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): The Good the Bad & the Ugly (27)
Leonard Maltin: Blow-Up
National Society of Film Critics: Blow-Up, Closely Watched Trains
BBC Foreign (2018): Persona (6), Battle of Algiers (19), Andrei Rublev (40), Au Hasard Balthazar (52)
Two other ‘66 films get mentioned on critics’ lists: Taylor and Burton’s dazzling fight in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Czech classic Closely Watched Trains. (Coincidentally, both of those were the first films for their respective directors, Mike Nichols and Jiří Menzel.)
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 nineteen films from 1966:
(19) Persona
(23) Andrei Rublev
(34) Au Hasard Balthazar
(75) Battle of Algiers
(98) Blow-Up
(138) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(250) Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(292) Daisies
(471) Closely Watched Trains
(480) Chelsea Girls
(537) Masculin Feminin
(577) The Rise to Power of Louis XIV
(638) The Round-Up
(759) The Hawks and the Sparrows
(784) Seven Women
(838) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(869) Black Girl
(973) Cul-de-sac
(990) Second Breath
Five 1966 films make the top 100, tying the record for a single year (shared with 1954, 1959, 1960, and 1975).
TSPDT and Sight & Sound are in agreement on the top six: there’s Persona again on top, followed closely by Rublev, Balthazar, Algiers, Blow-Up, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Trailing further back are Closely Watched Trains and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the other two films we found on critics’ “best” lists.
Also of note: just a year after his Moonlight-winning Pierrot le Fou/Alphaville double feature, Jean-Luc Godard returns with yet another pair of films that make TSPDT’s list, Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Masculin Feminin. We also have our first African film to crack TSPDT’s top 1000: Black Girl, from the acclaimed Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene.
General Audiences
But which films from 1966 do general audiences still watch?
There are a lot of heavy, long, slow, ponderous, challenging movies at the top of our critics’ lists this year - nothing populist about Persona or Andrei Rublev or Au Hasard Balthazar! - so it wouldn’t be surprising to see today’s audiences gravitating to other films, or just bypassing ‘66 altogether. But do they?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look 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. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1966, according to IMDB (as of April 30, 2022):
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (741,117 votes)
Persona (115,340)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (74,345)
Blow-Up (61,017)
Battle of Algiers (58,962)
Andrei Rublev (52,829)
Fahrenheit 451 (43,155)
Manos, The Hands of Fate (36,159)
A Man for All Seasons (34,209)
Batman '66 (32,622)
IMDB users tend to be ordinary folks, not film scholars; they’re more likely than not to be American, more likely than not to be male; they tend to gravitate toward populist films, in the English language, with male protagonists. What the hell is Persona doing so far up there?
Not many extremely popular films here, but the most notable thing is that general audiences and critics are strongly in agreement about the top films of 1966. Five of our critics’ top six films are also in the top six here; the only interloper is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, another film that does very well with critics. The only critical favorite that doesn’t do as well with general audiences is Au Hasard Balthazar, which is in 15th place with about 20,000 votes. (Even that’s pretty remarkable, given Balthazar’s challenging subject matter. For perspective, the number-15 film of 2016 is Moana; the number-15 film of 2006 is Borat; and the number-15 film of 1996 is Twister. All great films, but much more obviously audience-pleasing than a slow drama about an abused donkey.)
IMDB’s English-language bias does emerge, to an extent, in which of those leading films rise to the top. Persona is the exception, but three of IMDB’s top four films are in English (or dubbed in English), with Battle of Algiers and Andrei Rublev trailing behind. But the gap is very small: Algiers and Andrei trail Blow-Up by just a few thousand votes.
Which film has the most impressive showing on IMDB? You could make a case for several - including Persona, of course. This film, by all rights, should not do well with IMDB users, but it’s the second most popular film of the year, the third most popular foreign-language film of the decade (behind only Yojimbo and 8 ½), and Ingmar Bergman’s second most popular film (behind only The Seventh Seal). Even so, Persona is still way behind The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - which is not only the most-watched film of the year, but also the most-watched film of the decade, nearly 100,000 votes ahead of second-place Psycho. (IMDB users love them some Sergio Leone: four of his films are among the top 13 for the decade.)
Also putting up impressive numbers are Battle of Algiers and Andrei Rublev, both of which are among IMDB’s top 10 foreign-language films of the ‘60s. Andrei Rublev’s popularity surprises me the most: it’s a slow, three-hour drama about an obscure medieval Russian icon painter, with almost no comedy and minimal action, and yet it still resonates with general audiences.
But of course the most impressive showing of all is a bit further down: Manos, The Hands of Fate! Made on a dare by an El Paso fertilizer salesman, arguably the worst movie of all time, Manos emerged triumphantly from the dustbin of history when Joel and the ‘bots gave it the MST3K treatment - and today, at least according to IMDB, it’s the eighth most-watched film of the year. (More perspective: the number-8 film of 1996 is Jerry Maguire; number 8 in 2006 is X-Men: The Last Stand; number 8 in 2016 is La La Land.) As someone who once went as The Master for Halloween one year, I find this delightful. (And John Reynolds’ performance as Torgo still holds up, I don’t care what anyone says.)
And since I mentioned it, here are the top 10 foreign-language films of the 1960s, according to IMDB (with their overall rankings for the decade in parentheses):
(28) Yojimbo
(29) 8 1/2
(31) Persona
(44) Breathless
(52) La Dolce Vita
(56) Battle of Algiers
(61) Hara-Kiri
(62) Andrei Rublev
(65) Le Samouraï
(73) Belle de Jour
That’s not counting Leone’s English-dubbed Spaghetti westerns, of course.
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand - mostly in agreement with critics, as it turns out. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1966 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. Sadly, there were no write-in votes for Manos.)
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.)
Persona (6) 165
Blow-Up (5) 156
Battle of Algiers (3) 125
Au Hasard Balthazar (2) 114
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (3) 104
Andrei Rublev (1) 96
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 72
Daisies (2) 64
Masculin Feminin 47
Closely Watched Trains 41
Alfie (1) 36
Un Homme et Une Femme 30
Seconds 27
Black Girl 26
A Man For All Seasons 26
Tokyo Drifter 12
The Rise to Power of Louis XIV 7
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! 6
Second Breath 6
Come Drink With Me 5
Kill Baby Kill 1
The War Game 1
The War Game, down at the bottom, also got one write-in vote for 1965. It’s not always obvious which years correspond with which films: War Game was made in 1965 and scheduled for a ‘65 release, but didn’t actually come out until ‘66 thanks to a delay.
No surprise on top: like critics and general audiences, our experts love Persona, and their top six correspond exactly with TSPDT (with a notably strong showing for Blow-Up here). There’s a clear top five emerging: Persona, Blow-Up, Battle of Algiers, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, and Andrei Rublev are all among the top six in each of our metrics, with Au Hasard Balthazar and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf also getting a lot of love.
Further down, we got a very strong write-in vote for Sembene’s Black Girl, with five of our scholars adding it to their lists. The most acclaimed African film of the decade, a challenging and occasionally shocking exploration of casual racism and the subtle impact of colonialism, Black Girl did not score well enough with critics and general audiences to make our shortlist - but that might change in the future, if our experts’ vote is any indicator. Black Girl was the most popular write-in vote this decade - and the second most popular write-in vote we’ve ever seen. Only 1937’s Stella Dallas got more write-in votes, and we ended up giving that one a Moonlight nomination.
One more noteworthy result: neither will make our top five, but Věra Chytilová’s Daisies beats out Closely Watched Trains as the top Czech film of the year.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
This year it’s easy. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf hits with general audiences, and Au Hasard Balthazar performs well with critics and scholars, but there are exactly five films that get strong support across the board, making the top six on each of our metrics. Some years, there’s very little consensus; this year, critics and scholars and audiences are all largely in agreement.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1966 are:
ANDREI RUBLEV
BATTLE OF ALGIERS
BLOW-UP
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY PERSONA
A powerhouse lineup if ever there was one! We’ve routinely nominated Robert Bresson’s films in the past, and Balthazar is probably his most acclaimed - but it still doesn’t crack this top five. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is the most enduring film in the legendary careers of both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - but it still doesn’t crack this top five.
Incredibly, this means we will probably never nominate a single Elizabeth Taylor film, a fact that offers some insight into which types of films tend to hold up - and which types don’t. Taylor was best known for sweeping period pieces (Giant, Cleopatra, Quo Vadis, Becket) and non-musical stage-to-screen adaptations (Virginia Woolf, Suddenly Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taming of the Shrew) - and with rare exceptions, we’ve found those two genres tend not to have as much lasting appeal. (Stage-to-screen adaptations in particular! We gave a nod last year to Chimes at Midnight, which mashed several Shakespeare plays into one - but we haven’t nominated a direct play adaptation since A Streetcar Named Desire, all the way back in 1951. Bad news for Taylor, whose best performances were all in stage-to-screen films like Virginia Woolf and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.)
There’s also a little bit of timing involved, of course: Virginia Woolf certainly holds up better than, say, The Leopard or Dr. Zhivago, but those two period epics got Moonlight nominations because they came out in years with weaker competition. (Same goes for Chimes at Midnight.)
How about the five who did make the cut? Three directors get their first nominations: Andrei Tarkovsky for Andrei Rublev, Gillo Pontecorvo for Battle of Algiers - and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s Sergio Leone, who just missed our cut the last two years but finally breaks through with the last of his Man With No Name trilogy. Remarkably, this is also just the second nomination for Ingmar Bergman, his first since 1957’s The Seventh Seal.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Two and a half years ago, before Covid-19 was even a blip on our radar, we started to collect the data for this project - and it was immediately clear to me that 1966 was going to be a wild year. Between Andrei Rublev, Au Hasard Balthazar, Battle of Algiers, Blow-Up, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, Persona, and Virginia Woolf, there were seven great films all capable of claiming to be the ‘best’ and most enduring of the year. I couldn’t even begin to predict who’d get nominated, let alone who’d win. Discussing this project with others, I always pointed to 1966 and said, “That’s the year I’m most excited about - lots of great movies, and I have no idea who’s going to win. It’s going to be close, for sure.”
Fast forward to 1966, and - turns out, it wasn’t that close at all. Who knew!
Not only is it easy to choose our five nominees, it’s also easy to identify our winner. Persona is the top film with our expert panel; it’s number-one on TSPDT’s critical aggregate; it makes the BBC’s top 10 and Sight & Sound’s top 20 - and in spite of all the reasons why it shouldn’t hit with IMDB’s general audiences, it’s the second most-popular film of the year there too, and one of the most popular foreign-language films of the decade. It’s number one or number two on every metric we checked; no other film comes close to that level of across-the-board popularity.
And so: congratulations to Persona, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1966!
Ingmar Bergman is now two-for-two: two Moonlight nominations and two wins, for Persona and The Seventh Seal. (And 1957 was also a stacked year! Not only does Bergman win, he wins in the hard years.) Only one other director won Moonlights on their first two nominations: Billy Wilder, who won in 1944 for Double Indemnity and in 1950 for Sunset Boulevard.
If Persona is our winner, which film is the runner-up? That’s a much, much harder question. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the clear winner with general audiences; Blow-Up is the leader with our expert panel; Andrei Rublev is tops with critics; and Battle of Algiers performs well across all metrics. In the absence of Persona, I think The Good, the Bad and the Ugly probably has the strongest case: it’s got a lot of critical and scholarly acclaim, it’s the runaway favorite on IMDB, and it’d be a nice way to honor the entire Man With No Name trilogy, which has had such a tremendous impact through the years. But you could make a case for any of them. (Our personal favorite is Battle of Algiers, in case anyone’s wondering.)
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1967, the year New Hollywood takes over:
BELLE DE JOUR BONNIE AND CLYDE THE GRADUATE PLAYTIME LE SAMOURAI
Belle de Jour is nomination number four for Luis Buñuel, who still has not won. Only one director has gotten past four nominations without winning: Alfred Hitchcock, who didn’t win until his fifth nomination. (Federico Fellini won on his fourth nomination, for 8 ½.) On the acting side, Belle de Jour is also the third nomination (in a four-year stretch!) for Catherine Deneuve, who also got nods for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Repulsion. And speaking of great French actors, Alain Delon gets his second nomination for Le Samouraï; he also got a nod for The Leopard.
Aside from Buñuel, most of 1967’s directors are new: Playtime’s Jacques Tati is the only other director with a past nomination, for 1958’s Mon Oncle. 1967 also brings us the first nominations for a few actors we’ll likely see again: Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate; Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Gene Hackman in Bonnie and Clyde. (And Richard Dreyfuss in The Graduate too, if we’re counting uncredited bit parts. I’ll leave that up to you, I wouldn’t want to be an agitator.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1966? Who should win the Moonlight for 1967? Join our community and weigh in!
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