When last we met, we were talking about 1947 - arguably the worst year ever for motion pictures. Luckily for us, though, 1947 was just a blip on the radar. By 1948, the film industry was back on its feet with several great films that would ultimately stand the test of time. But which one film from 1948 stands out among the rest?
To identify the Best Picture of 1948, 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
If you ask film critics, there’s no debate: the film of 1948 is Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, which famously ranked first in Sight & Sound’s inaugural 1952 survey of the greatest films ever made and is still celebrated to this day. Bicycle Thieves is no longer Sight & Sound’s number one, but it remains in the “best of all time” conversation: in 2018, it came in second in a BBC critics’ poll of the best foreign-language films of all time. (The Seven Samurai was first. More on that film in about six years.)
But Bicycle Thieves isn’t the only classic of 1948. John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre also wins praise from multiple sources - most notably the American Film Institute, which placed it in the top 50 on its list of the best American films ever made. Sierra Madre didn’t register on the BBC’s critics poll, but several other films did - particularly Max Ophüls’ Letter From an Unknown Woman, which made the BBC’s top 50.
Here’s a list of 1948 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Bicycle Thieves (33)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Bicycle Thieves (10)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Treasure of the Sierra Madre (38)
Leonard Maltin: Bicycle Thieves, Treasure of the Sierra Madre
BBC American (2015): Letter from an Unknown Woman (43), Red River (66)
BBC Foreign (2018): Bicycle Thieves (2), Spring in a Small Town (63)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Bicycle Thieves (26)
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 - and according to TSPDT, 1948 was a pretty good year for movies. TSPDT’s list includes twelve films from 1948, tied with 1946 for the most ever to date:
(13) Bicycle Thieves
(121) Letter From an Unknown Woman
(161) Spring in a Small Town
(162) The Red Shoes
(211) Red River
(236) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(240) Germany, Year Zero
(499) The Lady from Shanghai
(525) La Terra Trema
(714) They Live By Night
(765) Fort Apache
(965) Rope
(In case you’re wondering, that record won’t stand for long: TSPDT’s list includes 14 films from 1952.)
Once again, Bicycle Thieves stands out as the clear leader, but several other films also earn acclaim. Letter From an Unknown Woman and Treasure of the Sierra Madre both rank highly, but they’ve got new competition from last year’s winning directors, Powell & Pressburger, back once again with The Red Shoes. Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai cracks the top 500, though (in keeping with most outlets) we counted that as a 1947 film. Previous Moonlight winner Howard Hawks is back as well with Red River, also John Wayne’s most acclaimed film since Stagecoach. And near the top is Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, often called the greatest Chinese film ever made.
General Audiences
But which films from 1948 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 1948, according to IMDB (as of March 20, 2021):
Bicycle Thieves (148,074 votes)
Rope (130,859)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (115,093)
Key Largo (37,191)
The Red Shoes (31,310)
Red River (28,428)
Fort Apache (16,532)
Hamlet (15,436)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (14,895)
The Naked City (12,265)
IMDB users tend to favor American films, so it’s noteworthy that Bicycle Thieves is number one - especially since it’s up against Sierra Madre, plus beloved films by Alfred Hitchcock (Rope) and John Wayne (Red River, Fort Apache). (Not to mention Bogey & Bacall’s Key Largo, which was enduringly popular enough to get its own tribute in a classic 80s song.) Other classic foreign-language films from this year don’t do as well with IMDB voters - particularly Spring in a Small Town, which barely cracks the top 50.
Rope and Sierra Madre also do well with modern audiences. In fact Rope, with its one-shot gimmick, is the most-viewed Hitchcock film of the 1940s, according to IMDB - beating out Rebecca, Notorious, and our 1943 Moonlight winner Shadow of a Doubt. And Treasure of the Sierra Madre ranks as the third most popular film of Humphrey Bogart’s legendary career, behind only Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1948 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. We did miss Fort Apache this year, but it didn’t get any write-in votes either.)
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.)
Bicycle Thieves (9) 143
The Red Shoes (1) 89
Letter From an Unknown Woman (3) 84
Germany, Year Zero (2) 82
Rope (1) 74
Treasure of the Sierra Madre 60
The Naked City 56
Force of Evil 50
Red River 44
Key Largo (1) 37
Hamlet 34
The Fallen Idol 33
Oliver Twist 17
Spring in a Small Town 11
Raw Deal 8
Unfaithfully Yours 8
The Snake Pit 7
They Live By Night 6
Nosostros Los Pobres 5
Secret Beyond the Door 5
No surprise, Bicycle Thieves is the runaway winner. More interesting is the fight for second, with Red Shoes coming just ahead of Unknown Woman and Germany, Year Zero. Trailing just behind are the other two films most popular with general audiences, Rope and Sierra Madre.
Shockingly, Spring in a Small Town absolutely flopped with our panel; out of 17 panelists, only two placed it anywhere in their top ten. Red River also polled poorly, as did Key Largo (despite one first-place vote) and 1948’s Oscar winner, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Our panelists rejected Spring in a Small Town and neither Red River nor Key Largo did too well either, so it’s essentially a six-film fight. Bicycle Thieves is etched in stone, of course, and so is The Red Shoes, which makes the top five on every metric. We’ll also give nominations to Rope and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the other two 1948 movies (besides Bicycle Thieves) that still hit with general audiences.
That leaves Letter From an Unknown Woman and Germany, Year Zero, and between the two it’s no contest: Unknown Woman outranks Germany in every metric, so Ophüls gets the nod. (But props to Germany, Year Zero for being far and away the most relentlessly bleak and depressing movie I’ve ever seen. Thanks, Rossellini.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1948 are:
BICYCLE THIEVES
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
THE RED SHOES
ROPE THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Not even close this time: congratulations to Bicycle Thieves, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1948! Bicycle Thieves is the first movie since 1944’s Double Indemnity to sweep all of our categories: it’s the most acclaimed film of the year with critics, the most-watched film among general audiences, and the top votegetter with our panel of experts.
Which film is second, though? That’s a much more interesting question with no clear answer: Rope and Sierra Madre lead with general audiences, but critics prefer Unknown Woman and Red Shoes. We can eliminate Unknown Woman first, since it trails Red Shoes in most metrics, but it’s very hard to narrow it down from there. In the absence of Bicycle Thieves, we’d probably give the Moonlight to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, if only to make sure John Huston gets his due - but you could make a case for any of those three. (As it stands, Huston is now 0 for 2 in Moonlight nominations, along with Maltese Falcon. He’ll have another shot with The African Queen in 1951, but if he misses out there, he probably won’t get any recognition until 1974’s Chinatown, a film he starred in but didn’t direct.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1949:
ADAM'S RIB
KIND HEARTS & CORONETS
LATE SPRING
THE THIRD MAN
WHITE HEAT
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1948? Who should win the Moonlight for 1949? Join our community and weigh in!
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