Here's How We Picked The Best Movie Of 1932

According to the Oscars, “Grand Hotel” was the best film of 1932. But did the Oscars get it right? Now that we’ve got nearly 90 years of hindsight to help us out, let’s ask again: what really was the Best Picture of 1932? 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

For this project, we scoured a lot of critics’ lists of the very best movies of all time. Some years are better represented than others, though, and 1932 is not one of those years. Ernst Lubitch’s Trouble in Paradise is the only 1932 film that appears on any of the lists we studied, and it doesn’t show up very often. Leonard Maltin included “Trouble in Paradise” on his list of the 100 best films of the 20th century, and the National Society of Film Critics also included it on their top-100 list. And that’s it. 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 - and TSPDT’s list includes ten films from 1932: (149) Trouble in Paradise (207) Vampyr (251) Freaks (340) I Was Born, But… (366) Land Without Bread (568) Scarface (570) Boudu Saved From Drowning (603) Love Me Tonight (893) La Nuit du Carrefour (974) Shanghai Express General Audiences So Trouble in Paradise has the edge among the critics. But which 1932 films 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 person, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.) Here are the ten most-viewed films from 1932, according to IMDB (as of April 7, 2020):

Freaks (40,170 votes)

Scarface (23,998)

The Mummy (22,070)

Grand Hotel (16,447)

Vampyr (14,734)

Trouble in Paradise (12,203)

Horse Feathers (11,264)

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (11,076)

The Most Dangerous Game (9,789)

White Zombie (8,778)

There aren’t too many 1932 movies that still get viewed today: “Freaks” is the runaway leader, but even that film doesn’t attract too much attention. Critics and viewers do seem to agree on four films, though: Freaks, Scarface, Vampyr, and Trouble in Paradise are among the six most-viewed movies here, and they’re also among the six highest-ranking films on They Shoot Pictures’ list. We’re getting close to identifying our five nominees. But what do film scholars think? Scholarly Acclaim

We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1932 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. In this case, we did foolishly leave Ozu’s I Was Born, But... off our list, and it got quite a few write-in votes.) 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.) Scarface (5) 118 Trouble in Paradise (3) 101 Shanghai Express (2) 97 I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (3) 95 Vampyr (4) 88 Boudu Saved From Drowning (1) 87 Grand Hotel (1) 71

Freaks 63 Love Me Tonight (1) 57 Horse Feathers 49 The Mummy 41 I Was Born, But… 28

The Music Box 28 Blonde Venus 14 The Old Dark House 11

Que Viva Mexico 6 Kuhle Wampe 4

One Hour With You 4 The Bitter Tea of General Yen 3 American Madness 1 In 1930 and 1931, our scholars were largely in agreement: The Blue Angel and All Quiet on the Western Front got nearly all the first-place votes in 1930, while City Lights and M got nearly all the first-place votes in 1931. For 1932, though, there’s very little agreement: eight films get first-place votes, five films get multiple first-place votes, and no movie gets more than five. It’s a muddle. Choosing Five Nominees With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees? Critics and general audiences seem to agree on “Scarface,” “Trouble in Paradise,” “Vampyr,” and “Freaks,” and our scholarly panel concurs on the first three. Our scholars weren’t as enamored with “Freaks,” but it seems to have enough overall support to merit a nomination anyway. So what’s our fifth nominee? “Shanghai Express” got the most votes on our panel, followed very closely by “I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang” and “Boudu Saved From Drowning.” “Boudu” ranks highest on They Shoot Pictures’ list and “Fugitive” has the most IMDB votes - but we’ll go with our panel and give the nod to “Shanghai Express,” which also makes They Shoot Pictures’ list and gets more IMDB votes than “Boudu.” Our five Best Picture nominees for 1932 are: FREAKS

SCARFACE SHANGHAI EXPRESS TROUBLE IN PARADISE VAMPYR And The Winner Is… So after all that, who wins? “Shanghai Express” was definitely the fifth of the five nominees, so we can rule that one out. “Freaks” is the most enduringly popular film of the year and it has a lot of critical acclaim, but it fizzled with our scholarly panel. That leaves “Scarface,” “Vampyr,” and “Trouble in Paradise,” and you could make a strong case for either one. In the end, though, we went with “Trouble in Paradise,” the film that ranked highest among the critics and finished a close second with our panel of scholars. We also considered lifetime achievement: “Scarface” narrowly won with our scholars, but we’re pretty sure “Scarface” director Howard Hawks will get his Moonlight when 1938 rolls around. By contrast, 1932 is probably the only chance we’ll get to recognize Ernst Lubitsch. (Plus, who can say no to Gaston Monescu?) And so: congratulations to “Trouble in Paradise,” the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1932!

And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1933: Duck Soup 42nd Street Gold Diggers of 1933 King Kong Queen Christina What do you think? Did we get it right for 1932? Who should win the Moonlight for 1933? Join our community and weigh in!