In 1960, we saw a three-way battle between a trio of legendary directors: Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the scene with Breathless; Federico Fellini carried us around Rome in La Dolce Vita; and Alfred Hitchcock shocked us all (and won his fourth Moonlight) with Psycho.
Now it’s 1963, and lo and behold, the same three directors are back: Hitch with The Birds, another horror classic; Fellini with 8 ½, an incredibly creative semiautobiography about a director who’s lost his incredible creativity; and Godard with Contempt, a masterful film essay on cinema, cinema, marriage, and also cinema. And that’s only the beginning: among other things, 1963 also gives us Shock Corridor, Samuel Fuller’s sexy study of personal and societal insanity; populist action hits The Great Escape and From Russia With Love; and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, a Sicilian epic about an aristocratic family in the midst of social upheaval that stands exactly halfway between Gone With The Wind and The Godfather. (Which isn’t a bad place to be.) But which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1963, 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
Critics love Alfred Hitchcock, and The Birds is one of his most enduringly popular films - yet critics don’t love The Birds, at least not as much as his many other masterpieces. (Clearly they’ve never seen Birdemic.) In fact not a single American film from 1963 shows up on any critical list of the “best” films of all time, which is remarkable: the last year where that happened was 1947, and we’ll never see it happen again, all the way through 2009.
But film critics do like what was coming out of Europe. Fellini’s 8 ½, in particular, is frequently cited as one of the best films ever made - notably by Sight & Sound, which placed it in the top ten in its prestigious global critics’ survey. Not far behind is Godard’s Contempt, which made Sight & Sound’s top 50, and The Leopard, which actually outranked Contempt on the BBC’s 2018 ranking of the greatest foreign-language films of all time.
Here’s a list of 1963 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): 8 ½ (10), Contempt (T21), The Leopard (T57)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): 8 ½ (4), Contempt (T44)
Leonard Maltin: 8 ½
BBC Foreign (2018): 8 ½ (7), The Leopard (35), Contempt (60)
1963 is notable for lacking any highly-acclaimed American movies, but it’s not as unusual to see only three films getting critical citations in a given year: we also saw that in 1961, and we’ll see it again in 1965.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, 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 seventeen films from 1963:
(6) 8 ½
(40) Contempt
(72) The Leopard
(174) The Birds
(265) El Verdugo
(344) The House is Black
(386) Muriel
(392) High and Low
(398) Barren Lives
(565) The Servant
(595) Shock Corridor
(636) Scorpio Rising
(654) The Silence
(693) The Great Escape
(821) Flaming Creatures
(937) America, America
(991) The Nutty Professor
Jerry Lewis sneaks into the top 1000; the French will approve.
No surprise on top, as 8 ½, Contempt, and The Leopard lead the way; The Birds falls outside the top 100 but settles not too far behind our three frontrunners. American films do get some love here: among others, in addition to The Birds, we also have the aforementioned Shock Corridor and The Great Escape, Elia Kazan’s America, America, and Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic experimental short Scorpio Rising.
General Audiences
But which films from 1963 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 1963, according to IMDB (as of December 22, 2021):
The Great Escape (236,039 votes)
The Birds (181,819)
From Russia with Love (128,949)
8 1/2 (114,588)
The Sword in the Stone (94,390)
Charade (74,015)
The Pink Panther (50,823)
High and Low (40,771)
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (40,267)
The Haunting (38,368)
Contempt and The Leopard are just outside the top ten, in 12th and 14th places respectively.
Topping the list is The Great Escape, a favorite with Brits as well as Americans; The Birds is a ways back in second, with James Bond in a distant third. It’s 8 ½, though, that has the most impressive showing: as we’ve noted before, IMDB is an American website with a predominantly English-speaking audience, so it’s especially noteworthy when a non-English-language film garners a lot of votes. 8 ½ is the second most popular non-English film of the entire decade - narrowly trailing only Yojimbo, which won our Moonlight in 1961.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1963 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. In retrospect, I’m not sure why we didn’t include Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.)
We used a ranked-choice 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.)
8 ½ (9) 185
The Birds (3) 175
Contempt (2) 152
The Leopard (2) 95
Shock Corridor (3) 63
Tom Jones (3) 63
The Great Escape 61
Winter Light 57
From Russia with Love 55
The Haunting 46
Hud 45
The Pink Panther 44
The Servant 24
High and Low 16
The Sword in the Stone 16
Le Doulos (1) 10
The Nutty Professor 10
Lord of the Flies 9
Muriel 8
Blood Feast 7
Barren Lives 6
The Silence 6
The House is Black 5
America, America 4
This Sporting Life 4
Billy Liar 3
The Fiances 3
Matango 3
The Cool World 2
Judex 2
Lilies of the Field 2
An Actor's Revenge 1
It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World 1
It takes some time for a film to fall into the dustbin of history, so the closer we get to the present day, the more votegetters we receive each year. For 1963, our panel of 23 scholars cited a total of 33 films.
Critics and scholars agree on the top four films of the year, though: it’s 8 ½, Contempt, The Leopard, and The Birds by a wide margin over any other movie. With our panelists, Hitchcock puts up a much stronger showing; in fact The Birds was leading for a bit before some late-arriving votes put Fellini over the top. (8 ½ is the runaway winner in first-place votes, though, with nine; no film has had that many since Bicycle Thieves in 1948.)
Behind those four, it’s a packed race for fifth place, with From Russia with Love, Winter Light, and The Great Escape very narrowly trailing Shock Corridor and Tom Jones. (And we should probably add High and Low to that list: our inadvertent snub pulled in several write-in votes.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Four films are obvious locks - 8 ½, The Birds, Contempt, and The Leopard - but that fifth spot is a tossup. Should it go to one of our populist hits, The Great Escape or From Russia with Love? Do we honor Shock Corridor, probably Samuel Fuller’s only shot at a Moonlight nomination? Should we take it overseas and recognize Winter Light or High and Low? Or do we continue our three-year streak of nominating the year’s Oscar winner and give our last nod to Tom Jones?
We can eliminate Winter Light and From Russia with Love, both of which trail The Great Escape on every metric. (I’d love to nominate Russia, since it may be our only chance to nominate a Bond film, but it definitely comes up short.) Shock Corridor and Tom Jones are also out: they perform well with our panelists (and Shock Corridor does well with critics) but neither film lands with today’s moviegoers.
That leaves The Great Escape and High and Low, and we’ll let general audiences be the decider on this one. Kurosawa has a slight edge with critics, but Great Escape is easily the most popular film of the year - and since it also does well with critics and our panelists, it’s hard to deny Steve McQueen and crew that fifth and final nod.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1963 are:
THE BIRDS CONTEMPT
8 ½
THE GREAT ESCAPE THE LEOPARD
High and Low comes close, but we’ve still had only one non-shortlisted film that earned a nomination based on write-in votes: Stella Dallas, in 1937.
With The Leopard, Luchino Visconti earns his first nomination since his debut film, 1943’s Ossessione. That 20-year gap between nominations is tied for the longest ever: Luis Buñuel also waited 20 years between 1930’s L’Age d’Or and 1950’s Los Olvidados. (Will anyone break that record? Possibly: Akira Kurosawa may go 24 years between 1961’s Yojimbo and 1985’s Ran, unless Kagemusha gets a nod in 1980. An even darker horse: if John Huston’s The Dead gets a nomination in 1987, that would likely be his first in 39 years, after 1948’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)
Jean-Luc Godard earns his second nomination, Federico Fellini his fourth, but Alfred Hitchcock continues to slay the competition: The Birds is his thirteenth nominated film, nine more than any other director.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This one isn’t hard. The Great Escape is clearly fifth, The Leopard is clearly fourth, Contempt is probably third, and The Birds comes in second - but it’s 8 ½ that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Fellini wins (easily) with critics and (more narrowly) with our panelists; it gets more first-place votes with our panel than any other film in 15 years; and it’s in the top five with IMDB users in spite of their English-language bias. Like Lawrence of Arabia last year, 8 ½ doesn’t quite win the triple crown and finish first on all three of our metrics, but it comes about as close as you can get.
And so: congratulations to 8 ½, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1963!
Federico Fellini wins on his fourth nomination. He’s in a seven-way tie for second with four nominations (Hitchcock is the only director with more), and all seven of those directors have won at least one Moonlight: Fellini, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder. Only one director has made it to four nominations without winning a Moonlight: Hitchcock, who lost in 1935, 1936, 1938, and 1940 before finally winning on his fifth nod in 1943.
After 13 nominations and four wins, is Alfred Hitchcock finally done? He directed five movies after The Birds - Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot - but each of them will be longshots for nominations. 1964’s Marnie may have the best chance of the lot, so we’ll find out soon enough.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1964:
DR. STRANGELOVE
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
MARY POPPINS
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
WOMAN IN THE DUNES
No Marnie - and also no Fistful of Dollars, no Goldfinger, and no My Fair Lady. And no Gertrud, I Am Cuba, or The Gospel According to St. Matthew, all of which made Sight & Sound’s all-time top 100. 1964 was a very, very crowded year.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1963? Who should win the Moonlight for 1964? Join our community and weigh in!
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