“All Quiet on the Western Front” won the Oscar - but when all is said and done, what (definitively) was the best picture of 1930?
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
When critics and scholars rank the “best” movies of all time, some years are better represented than others - and 1930, as it happens, is one of the least represented years in film history. Leonard Maltin included “All Quiet on the Western Front” on his list of the 100 “must-see” movies of the 20th century - and that’s about it. No film from 1930 appears on any of the other “all-time best” lists we examined - at least not the ones that limit themselves to a top hundred, as most of them do.
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 five films from 1930:
(140) L’Age d’Or
(169) Earth
(665) The Blue Angel
(732) All Quiet on the Western Front
(831) Morocco
General Audiences
But which films from 1930 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 American, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.)
Here are the most-viewed films from 1930, according to IMDB (as of March 5, 2020):
All Quiet on the Western Front (55,018 votes)
The Blue Angel (12,929 votes)
Animal Crackers (12,664 votes)
L’Age d’Or (11,994 votes)
Murder! (5,326 votes)
Morocco (5,213 votes)
Hell’s Angels (4,602 votes)
Earth (4,561 votes)
A Propos de Nice (3,605 votes)
The Big Trail (3,191 votes)
“All Quiet” is the runaway winner here - though that may be partly a function of high school history teachers showing the film to their classes. There’s also a big gap between #4 and #5; “L’Age d’Or” has more than twice as many votes as “Murder!”.
In general, there are really only four 1930 films that people still watch on anything like a regular basis: All Quiet, The Blue Angel, Animal Crackers, and L’Age d’Or.
Scholarly Acclaim
With all that in mind, we turned to our panel of film scholars, gave them a list of 11 films from 1930, 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.)
The Blue Angel (10) 157
All Quiet on the Western Front (4) 115
Animal Crackers 103
L’Age d’Or (1) 95
Morocco 86
Anna Christie (1) 78
The Blood of a Poet (2) 73
People on Sunday 65
Earth 51
Murder! (1) 43
Hell’s Angels 29
Under the Roofs of Paris (1) 16
King of Jazz 7
The Big Trail 4
Whoopee 2
Madam Satan 2
Westfront 1918 1
Choosing Five Nominees
Between critics’ lists, IMDB votes, and our panel rankings, it’s pretty easy to identify the top four films of 1930: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Blue Angel,” “Animal Crackers,” and “L’Age d’Or.” Those are the top four vote-getting movies on IMDB, and they’re also the top four according to our scholarly panel. We’re all in agreement.
But we want five Best Picture nominees. How do we round out the top five?
“Earth” ranks highest according to They Shoot Pictures, but it doesn’t score as well among our scholars or IMDB voters. “Morocco” has the strongest claim to the fifth spot: it also makes They Shoot Pictures’ top 1000 list, it’s the sixth-most viewed film of the year according to IMDB, and it’s the #5 movie of the year according to our scholars.
Since Marlene Dietrich is already represented by “The Blue Angel,” though, we decided to spread the wealth a bit. Instead, we gave the fifth nomination to “Anna Christie,” Greta Garbo’s first talkie, which came in sixth among our scholars (and twelfth among IMDB voters).
And so, our five Best Picture nominees for 1930 are as follows:
L’Age d’Or
All Quiet on the Western Front
Animal Crackers
Anna Christie
The Blue Angel
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s easy to identify the top four from 1930, and it’s also easy to narrow that down to a top two: “The Blue Angel” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Those are the two most-viewed films of the year, according to IMDB, and they’re also first and second according to our scholarly panel.
You can make a strong case for either film as the Moonlight winner. But we went with “The Blue Angel,” the runaway winner among our panelists. “All Quiet” is a great war movie, but other war movies have come along since and improved on the model; Dietrich’s Lola, on the other hand, is just as compelling today as she was ninety years ago. (Much to Emil Jannings’ chagrin.)
And so: congratulations to “The Blue Angel,” the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1930!
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