On November 10, 1931, the Academy honored “Cimarron” with the year’s Best Picture award. But let’s be honest, there were a lot of other, better movies from that year. Now that we’ve got 90 years of hindsight to help us judge, let’s ask again: what really was the Best Picture of 1931?
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
Two films from 1931 show up repeatedly on critics’ lists of the best movies of all time: Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” and Fritz Lang’s “M.” Both films rank in the top 100 in Sight and Sound’s 2012 surveys of critics and directors, with City Lights slightly higher; City Lights ranks 11th in the AFI’s ranking of the best American films of all time - and 18th in the BBC’s ranking of the top American films - while M ranks 13th in the BBC’s list of the top 100 foreign-language films.
Three other films do get mentioned on all-time “best” lists. Frankenstein gets the most love: it ranks 55th in Entertainment Weekly’s 2013 ranking of the best films of all time, and both the National Society of Film Critics and critic Leonard Maltin included Frankenstein on their respective top-100 lists of 20th-century films. Maltin also included another 1931 film, Dracula, while the NSFC included The Public Enemy. (Interestingly, the NSFC snubbed City Lights.)
Here’s a list of 1931 films that show up in critics’ “all-time best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound (critics): City Lights (T50), M (56)
Sight & Sound (directors): City Lights (T30), M (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): City Lights (11)
Leonard Maltin: City Lights, M, Dracula, Frankenstein
NSFC: Frankenstein, M, Public Enemy
BBC American: City Lights (18)
BBC Foreign: M (13)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Frankenstein (55)
Most of those all-time best lists rank the top hundred films of all time. 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 seven films from 1931:
(28) City Lights
(58) M
(250) Tabu
(464) Frankenstein
(477) Limite
(855) Le Million
(936) La Chienne
General Audiences
But which films from 1931 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 they also tend to be American too - and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.)
Here are the ten most-viewed films from 1931, according to IMDB (as of March 22, 2020):
City Lights (156,341 votes)
M (134,604)
Frankenstein (61,544)
Dracula (43,635)
The Public Enemy (16,800)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (11,917)
Little Caesar (11,330)
Monkey Business (10,832)
Cimarron (5,069)
Tabu (4,666)
There’s a clear top two (City Lights and M) and a clear top four (with Frankenstein and Dracula), and The Public Enemy is pretty well-entrenched in fifth. When it comes to 1931, general audiences and critics seem to be pretty solidly in agreement with each other: City Lights and M are the two best films of the year, followed by Frankenstein in third, with Dracula and The Public Enemy rounding out the top five.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
With all that in mind, we turned to our panel of scholars, gave them a list of 11 films from 1931, 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.)
M (13) 176
City Lights (4) 157
The Public Enemy (1) 110
Frankenstein 110
Dracula (1) 78
A Nous La Liberte 70
La Chienne (1) 53
Tabu 52
Monkey Business 49
Little Caesar 48
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 34
Le Million 12
Enthusiasm 8
Marius 6
Threepenny Opera 6
Maedchen in Uniform 4
The Smiling Lieutenant 2
Night Nurse 1
The Blue Light 1
Choosing Five Nominees
Some years it’s very difficult to identify a top five, but 1931 is not one of those years. The five films that show up on critics’ “all-time best” lists are also the top five votegetters on IMDB - and also the top five votegetters on our scholarly panel. You could conceivably make a case for “Tabu,” which ranks third according to They Shoot Pictures and sneaks into the IMDB’s top 10 - but it’s a weak case. This year, it’s clear.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1931 are:
CITY LIGHTS DRACULA FRANKENSTEIN M THE PUBLIC ENEMY
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Pity poor Frankenstein, one of the greatest films of the decade. Had it come out a year earlier or later, it might have been the runaway winner - but it had the bad luck to come out in 1931, alongside two of the greatest films not only of the 1930s, but of all time. Likewise, Dracula and The Public Enemy were both massively influential, game-changing classics - but that’s not good enough either.
When all is said and done, there are only two films that can truly claim to be the Best Picture of 1931: City Lights and M. And there’s no right or wrong answer here: “M” is the runaway winner on our scholarly panel, but “City Lights” has a slight edge on critics’ lists and a bigger lead in IMDB votes.
In the end, we sided with our scholars and went with Fritz Lang. With apologies to the equally deserving “City Lights,” congratulations to “M,” the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1931!
(Don't feel too bad for Chaplin, though - we have a feeling he'll pick up a Moonlight of his own when 1936 rolls around.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1932:
Freaks
Scarface
Shanghai Express
Trouble in Paradise
Vampyr
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1931? Who should win the Moonlight for 1932? Join our community and weigh in!
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