Some years, all the top movies all seem to come from the same genre. 1960 was a horror year, with Psycho and Peeping Tom and Eyes Without A Face all together. 1984 was an action/comedy year, with Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, Temple of Doom, and more. 2010 was a great year for animated flicks: How to Train Your Dragon, Tangled, Despicable Me, Toy Story 3, The Illusionist. And superhero movies dominated in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. You get the idea.
Today we’re talking 1964, possibly the best year ever for musicals. My Fair Lady won the Best Picture Oscar, but that’s only the beginning: Mary Poppins became one of Disney’s most beloved films; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg turned a simple love story into something transcendent - and then there’s A Hard Day’s Night, a French New Wave classic cleverly disguised as a goofy teenybopper romp. Beyond that, 1964 also gives us Dr. Strangelove, arguably the best Cold War film ever made; A Fistful of Dollars, the first in Sergio Leone’s iconic man-with-no-name trilogy - and I haven’t even mentioned the three ‘64 films that made Sight & Sound’s 2012 list of the 100 best films of all time. But of all those, which one film stands out the most?
To identify the Best Picture of 1964, 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
Let’s start with Sight & Sound, which bypassed all those more popular films and elevated three lesser-known foreign masterpieces: The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first great film; Gertrud, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s last; and I Am Cuba, a Cuban/Soviet film that languished in obscurity until it was rediscovered after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s.
Other critics’ “greatest film” lists, though, tend to focus on the usual suspects. Dr. Strangelove gets the most love; among other things, it made the AFI’s and BBC’s respective rankings of the top 100 American movies ever made. Among musicals, My Fair Lady gets shut out, but Mary Poppins, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and A Hard Day’s Night all get cited in various lists.
Here’s a list of 1964 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Gertrud (T42)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Gospel According to St Matthew (T30), Gertrud (T59), I Am Cuba (T91)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Dr Strangelove (39)
Leonard Maltin: Dr Strangelove, Mary Poppins
National Society of Film Critics: Gospel According to St Matthew
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Dr Strangelove (37), Mary Poppins (64)
BBC American (2015): Dr Strangelove (42), Marnie (47)
BBC Foreign (2018): The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (51)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Goldfinger (49), A Hard Day’s Night (51), Dr Strangelove (69)
Not a lot of agreement here: we found nine critics’ lists with ‘64 films, but no individual movie got more than four citations. (That would be Strangelove; no other movie had more than two.) Remarkably, nine different films from this year get ranked among the “best” of all time, including two we haven’t even mentioned yet: Alfred Hitchock’s late-period classic Marnie and the iconic Bond flick Goldfinger. (Interestingly, the BBC ranked Marnie as Hitchcock’s fourth-best American film - higher than Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and even Rear Window.)
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 sixteen films from 1964:
(46) Dr. Strangelove
(90) Gertrud
(144) Gospel According to St. Matthew
(157) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(207) Black God, White Devil
(307) Red Desert
(361) I Am Cuba
(375) Marnie
(383) Woman in the Dunes
(431) Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors
(466) Charulata
(611) Band of Outsiders
(614) A Hard Day's Night
(831) Mary Poppins
(855) Kwaidan
(936) Dog Star Man
Goldfinger misses the cut, falling just outside the top 1000.
Stanley Kubrick lands on top with Dr. Strangelove, with Gertrud and Gospel not too far behind; our three big musicals, Cherbourg and Poppins and Hard Day’s Night, all linger slightly further back. TSPDT’s list also includes some familiar directors: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (Bande a Part) - the film after which Quentin Tarantino named his production company.
General Audiences
But which films from 1964 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 1964, according to IMDB (as of January 21, 2021):
Dr. Strangelove (474,062 votes)
A Fistful of Dollars (210,174)
Goldfinger (184,667)
Mary Poppins (166,971)
My Fair Lady (92,819)
Marnie (48,005)
A Hard Day's Night (44,109)
Zulu (38,304)
A Shot in the Dark (27,654)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (26,492)
Just outside the top ten, in 11th and 14th, are Band of Outsiders and Woman in the Dunes, two films that also made TSPDT’s top 1000.
Dr. Strangelove is the obvious frontrunner at this point: it’s got the most critical citations, it’s number one with TSPDT, and it’s the runaway winner here. There’s no clear hierarchy after that, though. Five films still resonate strongly with general audiences - Strangelove, Fistful of Dollars, Goldfinger, Mary Poppins, and My Fair Lady - but while all five are generally acclaimed as great films, only Strangelove and Poppins get critical citations. Lurking just behind, though, are several films - Marnie, Hard Day’s Night, and Umbrellas - which resonate a bit less with today’s moviegoers but get more critical love.
Worth noting in ninth place: Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark, the classic Pink Panther farce with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Between that and Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers had himself quite the year.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1964 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.)
Dr. Strangelove (11) 197
A Fistful of Dollars 107
Woman in the Dunes (2) 107
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 99
I Am Cuba (3) 96
A Hard Day's Night (2) 91
Band of Outsiders (1) 80
Marnie (1) 71
Gospel According to St. Matthew 53
Mary Poppins (1) 51
My Fair Lady (1) 49
Goldfinger 48
Gertrud 38
The Naked Kiss (1) 10
Zorba the Greek 10
Kwaidan 7
The Soft Skin 7
A Married Woman 6
The Red Desert 6
A Shot in the Dark 6
Fate is the Hunter 5
Marriage, Italian Style 5
Masque of the Red Death 5
Fail Safe 4
Seven Days in May 4
Viva Las Vegas 4
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul 3
Blood and Black Lace 3
King and Country 3
Nothing But A Man 3
One Potato, Two Potato 3
The Last Man on Earth 2
Pale Flower 2
Yesterday 2
Becket 1
Black Peter 1
Twenty-three films got write-in votes, including a first-place vote for Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, but there was no agreement among our panelists. Zorba the Greek got two write-in votes; no other film had more than one.
Once again, Dr. Strangelove is the runaway winner, with eleven first-place votes and nearly twice as many points as any other film. Strangelove is only the eighth film to earn at least 10 first-place votes with our panel, and the first in two decades: the other seven are 1930’s The Blue Angel (10), 1931’s M (13), 1936’s Modern Times (14), 1937’s Grand Illusion (11), 1939’s Rules of the Game (11), 1941’s Citizen Kane (14), and 1944’s Double Indemnity (10).
Everyone seems to agree on Strangelove, but after that, it’s still a muddle. Two surprising films tie for second place, Leone’s Fistful of Dollars and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes. Three other films fall just behind those two: I Am Cuba and two of our musicals, Umbrellas of Cherbourg and A Hard Day’s Night.
There’s a sizable gap between sixth and seventh, with Band of Outsiders 11 points behind Hard Day’s Night - so we can say our panel has a clear top six, if not a clear top five. Surprisingly, that top six does not include Mary Poppins, which was probably in second place heading into our panel vote but barely makes our experts’ top ten.
And if you picked Gertrud to finish last among our shortlisted movies - congratulations, you’re a far better prognosticator than I am.
One thing’s for sure: it’s pretty clear which one film emerges as the consensus ‘best’ of 1964 - but picking a top five is going to be much harder.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Dr. Strangelove is a lock. After that, though, you could make a case for any one of our shortlisted films to be included - or to be left out. This is partly because we’re (finally!) starting to see a separation between critics/scholars and general audiences. It’s routinely believed that critics and general audiences have wildly diverging tastes - regular folks love what the critics hate, and vice versa - but up until now, we’ve generally found that critics and scholars and ordinary moviegoers tend to gravitate toward the same films, at least over time. This year, though, it’s a slightly different story. Some of the biggest hits (Goldfinger, Fistful of Dollars, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady) are critically acclaimed, but not to the same extent as other films (Gertrud, I Am Cuba, Gospel According to St. Matthew) that moviegoers pass over. We’re looking for the films that rise to the top on all of the metrics, though - so how do we choose?
We can eliminate Gertrud and Gospel According to St. Matthew first: they both do well with critics, but they fizzle not only with general audiences, but also our expert panel. (Thus ends Carl Theodor Dreyer’s streak of getting a nomination for every single one of his films: 1932’s Vampyr, 1943’s Day of Wrath, and 1955’s Ordet all got nods in their respective years. None of them won - but if we went back a little further, Dreyer almost certainly would have a Moonlight for Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928.)
My Fair Lady is next out: our Best Picture winner doesn’t hit with critics or panelists, and fares only moderately well with general audiences. Band of Outsiders does a bit better with critics and panelists, but less so with today’s moviegoers; we can eliminate that one too. Next is Goldfinger, which has more resonance with general audiences - and slightly more critical love than My Fair Lady - but failed to hit with our panel.
That leaves seven films and four open spots, and the picture starts to get a little clearer. I wouldn’t have predicted Woman in the Dunes to make our top five, but it’s a critical favorite and a hit with our panel, finishing in a second-place tie - and, remarkably for an existentialist arthouse flick by a Japanese director not named Kurosawa, it still resonates with general audiences too. IMDB ranks Dunes as the 14th-most watched film of 1964 - and the third-most watched non-English language film, behind only Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Band of Outsiders. Pencil Teshigahara in for his first nomination.
And The Umbrellas of Cherbourg also deserves a nod: it’s the year’s most popular non-English film and it makes the top five with both our panelists and TSPDT’s critical aggregate. That’s three nominations locked in, and Umbrellas becomes our first nominated musical of the year.
Now it gets tougher. With only two spots left to fill, we have five great films to choose from: A Fistful of Dollars, A Hard Day’s Night, I Am Cuba, Marnie, and Mary Poppins. No right or wrong answers here. We can eliminate I Am Cuba first, though: it’s a critical darling and performs well with our panel, but while the other four films all make IMDB’s top ten for the year, I Am Cuba ranks 34th. It’s out.
What about the other two films in our panel’s top six, A Fistful of Dollars and A Hard Day’s Night? Fistful doesn’t perform as well with critics, so we’ll hold off on that one for now - but there’s no reason not to give a nod to Hard Day’s Night, which also makes TSPDT’s list as well as IMDB’s top ten. That’s our fourth.
That leaves three films left for one final spot: A Fistful of Dollars, Marnie, and Mary Poppins. Based on the numbers, you can make an equally strong case for or against each of them. I don’t know about you, though, but my gut tells me Mary Poppins is the one with the greatest lasting legacy. Right? If you want more justification: Marnie is middling at best on all of our metrics and Alfred Hitchcock has enough nominations already; Fistful does poorly with critics, it’s an unauthorized plagiarism of our ‘61 winner Yojimbo, and we’ll have a better chance to honor Leone in two years when The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly comes around. Really, though, you could put any of them in that fifth spot. We’ve got to pick one, so I’m going with Mary.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1964 are:
DR. STRANGELOVE
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
MARY POPPINS
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
WOMAN IN THE DUNES
With apologies to Marnie and A Fistful of Dollars - and several others too. 1964 was a strong year.
In a music-filled year, it’s fitting that three of our five nominees are musicals. The 1960s were a fine period for musicals, but we hadn’t had one make our top five since West Side Story in ‘61.
And among our directors are four first-time nominees: Richard Lester for Hard Day’s Night, Robert Stevenson for Mary Poppins, Jacques Demy for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Hiroshi Teshigahara for Woman in the Dunes. In all four cases, this is likely to be their only nomination - unless Demy gets a nod in 1967 for The Young Girls of Rochefort (not very likely) or Lester gets one in 1980 for Superman II (even less likely).
Our snub of Marnie almost certainly means Alfred Hitchcock ends his incredible career with 13 Moonlight nominations and four wins. No other director has more than four nominations (though one is about to get a fifth - guess who?), and no other director has more than two wins. If this project has taught me anything, it’s that there really is no serious debate about who’s the best director of all time. It’s Hitch, by a country mile.
But Dr. Strangelove’s runaway nomination signals the start of what’s likely to be a pretty amazing run for Stanley Kubrick. This is only his second nomination so far, after 1957’s Paths of Glory, but he’s likely to earn nods for each of his next five films: 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange, 1975’s Barry Lyndon, 1980’s The Shining, and (a bit less certain) 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. He’ll rank among the greatest ever too, when he’s done.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s not even close, and no sense in drawing it out: congratulations to Dr. Strangelove, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1964!
Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, and 8 ½ came close, but Strangelove is the first movie of the decade to win our triple crown, finishing first on all three of our metrics: it’s the number-one film of the year on TSPDT’s critical aggregate, it’s the most-watched film of the year with general audiences, and it’s our panel’s top choice as well.
Which other films have won the triple crown? It’s a pretty impressive list: Modern Times in 1936; Bringing Up Baby in 1938; Citizen Kane in 1941; Casablanca in 1942; Double Indemnity in 1944; Bicycle Thieves in 1948; The Third Man in 1949; and Singin’ in the Rain in 1952. It’s been a 12-year gap between triple crown winners - but (spoiler alert) the next gap won’t be quite as long, because we’ll have another before the decade is out.
Dr. Strangelove is the runaway winner, but what’s second? I would have guessed Mary Poppins until it fizzled with our panel - but since it did, the runner-up trophy probably goes to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s the most popular non-English film of the year according to IMDB; it’s in a near tie with Woman in the Dunes and A Hard Day’s Night with our panel; and aside from Strangelove, it’s the highest-ranking nominee on TSPDT’s critical aggregate.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1965:
CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT
DR. ZHIVAGO
PIERROT LE FOU
REPULSION
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Our five nominated directors in 1964 included four first-timers and only one past nominee. This time, it’s exactly the opposite: Roman Polanski gets his first nod for Repulsion, but after that we have Robert Wise (his third nomination), Jean-Luc Godard (his third), David Lean (his fourth) - and Orson Welles, who breaks a seven-way tie for second by landing his fifth nomination for Chimes at Midnight. (Chimes narrowly edged out Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits for the final spot in the top five. Fellini also had four nominations, so either way, somebody was breaking that tie.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1964? Who should win the Moonlight for 1965? Join our community and weigh in!
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