We won’t leave you in any suspense this time around: it’s almost universally recognized that the best picture of 1941 is Citizen Kane, and we didn’t find anything different. But 1941 also had the first great noir picture of all time, another animated classic from Disney - and a pretty spectacular year from Preston Sturges, who directed not one but two beloved comedies.
To identify the Best Picture of 1941, 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
Citizen Kane makes just about every critical all-time “best” list that’s ever been published. Indeed, it’s sometimes headline news when Kane doesn’t place first - as in 2012, when Sight & Sound had the audacity to rank it second.
In addition to Kane, though, several other 1941 films also merit mentions. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon is the one that appears the most, but critics also cite Sturges’ two great films from this year, The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels. Notably, the BBC in 2015 ranked Eve as the number-32 American-made film of all time.
Here’s a list of 1941 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Citizen Kane (2)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Citizen Kane (3)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Citizen Kane (1), Maltese Falcon (31), Sullivan’s Travels (61)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Citizen Kane (46)
Leonard Maltin: Sullivan’s Travels, Citizen Kane, Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve
National Society of Film Critics: Citizen Kane, Maltese Falcon
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Citizen Kane (3)
BBC American (2015): Citizen Kane (1), The Lady Eve (32), The Shanghai Gesture (72)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Citizen Kane (1), Maltese Falcon (27), Sullivan’s Travels (96)
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 eight films from 1941:
(1) Citizen Kane
(143) The Lady Eve
(237) Sullivan’s Travels (271) The Maltese Falcon
(347) How Green Was My Valley
(695) Dumbo
(976) The 47 Ronin
(987) Hellzapoppin’
General Audiences
For critics, there’s a clear top four from 1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, and the two Sturges films, Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels. Critics also still like the actual Oscar-winner from that year, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, as well as Disney’s classic Dumbo.
But which films from 1941 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 1941, according to IMDB (as of August 16, 2020):
Citizen Kane (388,378 votes)
The Maltese Falcon (146,595)
Dumbo (116,630)
Suspicion (31,535)
Sullivan’s Travels (23,372)
The Wolf Man (23,000)
How Green Was My Valley (20,729)
The Lady Eve (18,568)
Sergeant York (14,985)
High Sierra (14,670)
Citizen Kane is easily the most-watched film of 1941; in fact it’s the second most-watched film of the entire decade (behind only Casablanca). Maltese Falcon and Dumbo also get love from modern-day audiences. And that’s about it: there’s a huge gap between Dumbo in third place and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion in fourth.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1941 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.)
Citizen Kane (14) 167
The Maltese Falcon 116
Sullivan’s Travels (1) 109
The Lady Eve (1) 91
Suspicion (2) 61
Dumbo 55
High Sierra 51
The Little Foxes 41
The Shanghai Gesture 37
How Green Was My Valley 33
Ball of Fire 32
The Wolf Man 27
Sergeant York 18
Here Comes Mr. Jordan 16
49th Parallel 15
47 Ronin 8
Ornamental Hairpin 8
Meet John Doe 6
Hellzapoppin’ 1
Unsurprisingly, Citizen Kane is an almost-unanimous number one. (In case you’re wondering: of the four scholars who did not rank Kane first, two of them had Kane in second, one in sixth, and one in seventh. If you’re not a huge fan of Citizen Kane, rest assured you’re not alone: there are at least two highly-respected film scholars who don’t even think it’s one of the top five films of its own year.)
This year, the more interesting battle is for second place. Sullivan’s Travels got six second-place votes, more than any other film; Maltese Falcon was close behind with five (and also had enough third-place votes to vault it over Sullivan in total points). And in a mild surprise, Suspicion was the only non-Kane movie to get multiple first-place votes - but only two other scholars placed it in their top four.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
This year it’s not too hard, because there are four obvious locks: Citizen Kane, Maltese Falcon, Sullivan’s Travels, and Lady Eve. In previous years we’ve tried to avoid nominating multiple films by the same director, but Sturges really can’t be denied this time.
So what’s our fifth nominee? You could make a case for Suspicion, which is fourth with general audiences and fifth with our panelists - but we’ll go with Dumbo instead. Dumbo has significantly more love from general audiences, it’s a close sixth with our panel - and unlike Suspicion, it also makes TSPDT’s top 1000 list. (Suspicion, by contrast, doesn’t even make TSPDT’s top two thousand.) Hitchcock is already our all-time leader with four Moonlight nominations, but he’ll have to wait at least a year for his fifth. (Two years, to be exact. Spoiler alert.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1941 are:
CITIZEN KANE DUMBO
THE LADY EVE THE MALTESE FALCON
SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Kane, obviously, but what’s more interesting here is the fight for second: which film would win the Moonlight if Orson Welles weren’t there to hog the glory? It’d be hard to deny Preston Sturges, who had about as good a year as any director’s ever had - and of his two films, Sullivan’s Travels has a slight edge over Lady Eve with both general audiences and our expert panel. In the end, though, the non-Kane Moonlight would almost certainly go to Maltese Falcon: it’s a clear second with general audiences, and it also came out narrowly ahead of Sullivan and Eve with our panel too.
But that’s all hypothetical. No suspense necessary this time: congratulations to Citizen Kane, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1941!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1942:
BAMBI
CASABLANCA
CAT PEOPLE
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1941? Who should win the Moonlight for 1942? Join our community and weigh in!
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