Every year tells a different story. We’ve just come out of 1957, a year with a deep bench of universally acclaimed classics, so many that it was hard to narrow it down to five nominees, and none that stood out as the obvious winner. Now we arrive at 1958, a year with very few films that still resonate today - but two standouts in particular, both of which are often ranked among the very best movies ever made. But which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1958, 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
The two films that stand out are Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, both of which routinely show up on critics’ lists of the best films of all time. Vertigo in particular soars to the top - most notably in Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 critics’ survey, where Hitch’s masterpiece took the top spot, dethroning Citizen Kane for the first time in half a century.
Here’s a list of 1958 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Vertigo (1), Touch of Evil (T57)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Vertigo (T7), Touch of Evil (T26)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Vertigo (9)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Vertigo (54)
Leonard Maltin: Vertigo
National Society of Film Critics: Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Ashes & Diamonds
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Vertigo (70)
BBC American (2015): Vertigo (3), Touch of Evil (51)
BBC Foreign (2018): Ashes & Diamonds (99)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Vertigo (38), Touch of Evil (75)
Vertigo and Touch of Evil both get multiple citations - but that’s about it for 1958. There’s only one other film from that year that we found on any critical “best” list: Andrzej Wajda’s Polish thriller Ashes & Diamonds, a New Wave classic about resistance fighters in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Beyond those three films, 1958 is entirely shut out.
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 thirteen films from 1958:
(2) Vertigo
(31) Touch of Evil
(226) Ashes & Diamonds
(293) The Music Room
(404) Mon Oncle
(422) Some Came Running
(663) Nazarin
(689) Big Deal on Madonna Street
(723) The Tiger of Eschnapur
(886) Man of the West
(916) Moi, un Noir
(919) Horror of Dracula
(923) Elevator to the Gallows
No surprise: there’s Vertigo and Touch of Evil on top again, distantly followed by Ashes & Diamonds in third. Just behind Ashes is Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room, followed by Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati’s follow-up to Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (which narrowly missed a Moonlight nomination in 1953).
General Audiences
But which films from 1958 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 1958, according to IMDB (as of August 29, 2021):
Vertigo (380,451 votes)
Touch of Evil (101,264)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (47,215)
The Hidden Fortress (37,041)
The Blob (24,681)
Elevator to the Gallows (23,679)
Horror of Dracula (23,318)
Gigi (21,804)
The Fly (21,776)
Mon Oncle (21,037)
Once again, Vertigo is the runaway leader, with Touch of Evil a clear second. (Vertigo is, in fact, the third-most watched film of the entire decade according to IMDB, trailing only 12 Angry Men and Rear Window.) No other 1958 film resonates strongly with today’s moviegoers, so several cult classics make it into our top ten: The Blob, The Fly, and Horror of Dracula.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 16 films from 1958 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-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.)
Touch of Evil (3) 149
Vertigo (8) 142
Mon Oncle 76
Ashes & Diamonds (2) 74
Elevator to the Gallows (2) 58
The Hidden Fortress 58
Gigi (1) 52
Man of the West 36
Some Came Running (1) 36
Cairo Station 35
The Blob 28
The Music Room 27
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 26
A Night to Remember 25
The Defiant Ones 24
Horror of Dracula 12
Ivan the Terrible II (1) 10
A Movie 9
Bonjour Tristesse 6
Le Chant du Styrene 2
Murder by Contract 1
In a mild upset, Touch of Evil comes in first with our panel, narrowly beating Vertigo; Hitchcock got significantly more first-place votes, but Touch of Evil got nine second-place votes, giving Orson Welles the edge on points.
Notwithstanding the order, though, our panelists agree that Vertigo and Touch of Evil are far and away the two best films of 1958. Mon Oncle, in third place, has barely half as many points as second-place Vertigo. (It’s another mild upset in the fight for third, with Mon Oncle beating Ashes & Diamonds by a nose.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Vertigo and Touch of Evil make the cut, no question. Alfred Hitchcock earns his tenth Moonlight nomination, more than twice as many as any other director. Orson Welles gets his fourth nomination (his first since 1947’s Lady of Shanghai), moving him into a tie for second with Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Howard Hawks.
After that, it gets a little trickier. We’ll give the third nomination to Ashes & Diamonds: it’s only 16th with general audiences, but critics agree it’s the best film of the year not named Vertigo or Touch of Evil. Our fourth nod goes to Mon Oncle, which performs well across the board: Mr. Hulot comes in third with our panel and fifth with TSPDT, and he also makes IMDB’s top ten.
So what’s fifth? Of our remaining choices, The Music Room is the top-rated film according to TSPDT, but Ray fails to resonate with either general audiences (34th) or our panelists (12th). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof gets the most IMDB votes, but it’s 13th with our panel and misses TSPDT’s list entirely.
The two best candidates for the fifth nomination are probably Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress; they’re tied for fifth with our panel and they both make IMDB’s top six. They’re virtually tied, but we’ll give the nod to Malle: Elevator is slightly behind Fortress with general audiences, but it makes TSPDT’s top 1000, whereas Fortress does not. (Plus, this may be Malle’s best shot at a nomination: Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, and Au Revoir Les Enfants all got released in crowded years.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1958 are:
ASHES & DIAMONDS ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
MON ONCLE TOUCH OF EVIL VERTIGO
Apologies to Kurosawa, who just misses out on his fourth nomination for the second straight year. Throne of Blood almost certainly would have gotten the nod if it had been Kurosawa’s 1958 entry; unfortunately it got lost in the crowd of great films in ‘57. (For that matter, we should also pour one out for the other films that just missed our cut last year - Wild Strawberries and Sweet Smell of Success - both of which would have easily earned nominations if they’d been released just a few months later.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Not a hard choice this time: it’s a two-film race between Vertigo and Touch of Evil, and while our panelists narrowly favored Orson Welles, Hitchcock is number one by a wide margin on every other metric.
And so: congratulations to Vertigo, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1958!
With Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock becomes our first three-time winner, moving past two-time winners Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. Hitch also won for Shadow of a Doubt in 1943 and Strangers on a Train in 1951 - and you can make a very strong case that he should also have won for The 39 Steps in 1935 and Rear Window in 1954. It’s remarkable just how large the gap is between Hitchcock and every other director.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1959:
THE 400 BLOWS HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR
NORTH BY NORTHWEST PICKPOCKET
SOME LIKE IT HOT
With North by Northwest, Hitchcock gets his eleventh nomination right away. Depending on how things shake out, Hitch could win his fourth Moonlight, twice as many as anyone else - or Billy Wilder could tie Hitchcock with three Moonlights by winning for Some Like It Hot. (In fact this will likely be the first of two consecutive Hitch/Wilder showdowns, since Psycho and The Apartment both came out in 1960. These are also the years of The 400 Blows, La Dolce Vita, and Breathless, though, so it’s also possible Hitchcock and Wilder will both come up empty-handed.)
Film buffs will notice some great 1959 movies that didn’t make our top five: Rio Bravo, Ben-Hur, Shadows, and Imitation of Life, just to name a few. Like 1957, ‘59 was a very crowded year.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1958? Who should win the Moonlight for 1959? Join our community and weigh in!
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