So far in our journey through movie history, we’ve only agreed with the Oscars once: in 1934, when It Happened One Night won both the Academy Award and the Moonlight for Best Picture. But 1940’s Oscar-winner is a bona fide classic from a legendary director: Rebecca, the only Hitchcock film ever to win Best Picture. On the other hand, 1940 is a year full of masterpieces, from actors and directors at the top of their game. Will we fall in line with the Academy again? Will Hitch finally win his first Moonlight, on his fourth try? Or will someone else come out on top?
To identify the Best Picture of 1940, 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
There are several films from 1940 that critics list among the all-time greats. The American Film Institute put both The Grapes of Wrath and The Philadelphia Story in its top 50; Leonard Maltin also cited Grapes as one of the best of the century, along with His Girl Friday and the Disney classic Fantasia. (It was a good year for romantic comedies: in addition to Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday, another rom-com, The Shop Around the Corner, makes some critical lists as well.)
Here’s a list of 1940 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): The Grapes of Wrath (23), The Philadelphia Story (44)
Leonard Maltin: The Grapes of Wrath, His Girl Friday, Fantasia
National Society of Film Critics: The Bank Dick, Dance Girl Dance
BBC American (2015): His Girl Friday (50), The Shop Around The Corner (58)
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 nine films from 1940:
(142) His Girl Friday
(173) The Great Dictator
(178) The Grapes of Wrath
(253) The Shop Around the Corner
(329) The Philadelphia Story
(406) Pinocchio
(463) Fantasia
(673) Rebecca
(735) The Thief of Bagdad
General Audiences
The year 1940 boasts three beloved romantic comedies in His Girl Friday, Philadelphia Story and Shop Around the Corner; two great Disney films in Pinocchio and Fantasia; and classics from John Ford and Charlie Chaplin in addition to Hitch’s Oscar-winner.
But which films from 1940 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 1940, according to IMDB (as of August 12, 2020):
The Great Dictator (196,659 votes) Pinocchio (127,264)
Rebecca (118,910)
Fantasia (86,603)
The Grapes of Wrath (84,497)
The Philadelphia Story (61,988)
His Girl Friday (52,119)
The Shop Around the Corner (26,712)
Foreign Correspondent (17,812)
The Thief of Bagdad (11,621)
The top eight films of 1940 according to They Shoot Pictures are also the eight most-watched movies of the year according to IMDB. Surprisingly, The Great Dictator - a close second on TSPDT’s list - is the runaway leader here.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1940 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 Great Dictator (4) 140
His Girl Friday (3) 118
Rebecca (1) 110
The Grapes of Wrath (3) 101
The Philadelphia Story 93
The Shop Around the Corner (4) 85
Fantasia (2) 73
Dance Girl Dance (2) 52
Pinocchio 51
The Thief of Bagdad 30
Foreign Correspondent 23
The Letter 19
The Bank Dick 17
The Mortal Storm 12
The Great McGinty 7
Down Argentine Way 5
Gaslight (1940) 4
The Long Voyage Home 4
Christmas in July 3
Stranger on the Third Floor 2
(Fun fact: I actually didn’t know about the 1940 version of Gaslight, so when I got that write-in vote, my immediate first thought was, “Wait, no, Gaslight isn’t from 1940 … is it? It’s 1944, right? Unless I’m completely craz… heyyy!”)
Our first-place votes are scattered amongst many movies (sorry, Philadelphia Story), but The Great Dictator is a surprise runaway winner here too. (It got six second-place votes in addition to the four first-place votes, so more than half our panelists put it in their top two.) Behind that, though, there’s a close battle for second between His Girl Friday, Rebecca, Grapes of Wrath and Philadelphia Story; Shop Around the Corner has its devotees but still trails a bit behind. Our panelists didn’t much like Disney this year.
And a special shoutout to the consistency of The Thief of Bagdad: ninth on TSPDT’s list, tenth on IMDB, and tenth among our scholars. It has no chance of being one of our five nominees, but it’s absolutely in the top ten, no matter how you look at it.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There’s a clear top eight this year: the three rom-coms, His Girl Friday, Philadelphia Story and Shop Around the Corner; the two Disney classics, Pinocchio and Fantasia; and the three prestige pictures from legendary directors, Rebecca, Grapes of Wrath, and Great Dictator. If you want to be 1940-film literate, these are the eight flicks not to miss. But how do we narrow it down?
The Great Dictator is a lock for sure, since it comes in first with both general audiences and our expert panel. His Girl Friday is also a lock; it’s second with our experts and first with critics. It gets a little harder after that, but The Grapes of Wrath is our third nominee: it’s in the top five on all three of our metrics, and it makes the AFI’s top-100 list for good measure. And we’ll give the fourth nomination to Rebecca: though it’s only eighth with TSPDT, Hitchcock makes the top three with both IMDB viewers and our panel of scholars. (This is already Hitch’s fourth Moonlight nomination, along with The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes.)
That leaves one more spot and four films vying for it. Philadelphia Story probably has the best claim, all things considered, but it’d be a shame not to nominate Disney, which released not one but two of the greatest animated films of all time this year. Personally I’m partial to Pinocchio, but we’ll go with our scholars and give the last spot to Fantasia.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1940 are:
FANTASIA
THE GRAPES OF WRATH THE GREAT DICTATOR HIS GIRL FRIDAY REBECCA
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
We started out by wondering if this would be a year we agreed with the Oscars, but it’s not to be. Rebecca is indeed a classic, but it’s not the best film of 1940 by any of our metrics. Grapes of Wrath and Fantasia also stand the test of time - honestly, you could argue that 1940 was a better year for movies than 1939 was! - but they’re not our winners either.
This year, it comes down to a choice between The Great Dictator and His Girl Friday, and either film is eminently worthy. (Both directors - Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hawks - are also past Moonlight winners, so whomever we choose will be our first two-time winner.) These are the top two films of the year according to They Shoot Pictures (Friday in first) as well as our expert panel (Dictator in first). We’re huge fans of His Girl Friday, arguably the fastest comedy ever made - but there’s one metric where the two films are distinct: general audiences favor Great Dictator by a wide margin. All else being equal, we’ll go with that. (Plus, it’s 2020. Now’s as good a time as any to stick it to the far right.)
And so: congratulations to The Great Dictator, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1940! (And congrats to Chaplin, our first two-time winner. Alfred Hitchcock is officially our Susan Lucci: he now holds the record for most nominations, with four, but he still hasn’t won. His time will come, though - heck, he could win three in a row from 1958-60.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1941:
CITIZEN KANE
DUMBO
THE LADY EVE THE MALTESE FALCON
SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS
(Blah, blah, Orson Welles, sure, but it was a pretty good year for Preston Sturges too.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1940? Who should win the Moonlight for 1941? (I mean, it’ll be Citizen Kane, but we can still argue.) Join our community and weigh in!
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