Blame it on the war if you like, but in terms of “films that have stood the test of time,” 1943 was one of the worst years in cinema history. In all the critics’ rankings we examined, only a couple films got any mention; and only one film from this year (not mentioned by the critics) is even a blip on the radar for modern audiences. Our expert panel mostly avoided casting write-in votes for this entire decade, but 1943 was the exception as the panelists were unimpressed with the films on our ballot - but even then, the panelists couldn’t agree on which film to write in, so they were unimpressed with each other’s choices as well.
And yet: 1943 still boasts the birth of Italian neo-realism, a late masterpiece from Carl Theodor Dreyer, another great Tourneur horror flick, a well-liked Henry Fonda vehicle, a Powell & Pressburger classic, a highly influential avant-garde short from a pioneering female director, and the film Alfred Hitchcock later described as the best one he ever made. So we’ve got options, after all.
To identify the Best Picture of 1943, 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
There is one year in post-1930 film history where not a single movie shows up on any of the critics’ “best” lists that we examined. This is not that year - but it’s pretty close.
The highest honor goes to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s epic The Life & Death of Col. Blimp - hated by Churchill at the time, but now often described as the most quintessentially British film ever made. The Archers sneaked onto Sight & Sound’s respected 2012 critics’ poll of the 100 best films of all time. The Ox-Bow Incident, with Henry Fonda, made it onto Leonard Maltin’s list of the best movies of the twentieth century. And then there’s Maya Deren’s experimental silent 14-minute short Meshes of the Afternoon, a darling among film scholars, which got recognized by the BBC in 2015 as one of the best American films ever made. (You can watch it now if you like. We'll wait.)
Here’s a list of 1943 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): The Life & Death of Col. Blimp (T93)
Leonard Maltin: The Ox-Bow Incident
BBC American (2015): Meshes of the Afternoon (40)
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 seven films from 1943:
(186) The Life & Death of Col. Blimp
(264) Meshes of the Afternoon
(277) Day of Wrath
(495) Shadow of a Doubt
(594) I Walked with a Zombie
(787) Ossessione
(853) Fires Were Started
Blimp and Meshes are on top here too, followed closely by Day of Wrath, Dreyer’s exploration of a medieval witch hunt - which inspired the anti-Nazi resistance in Dreyer’s native Denmark, and would later inspire the Amercian playwright Arthur Miller to write his own witch-hunt allegory, The Crucible.
General Audiences
But which films from 1943 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 1943, according to IMDB (as of September 15, 2020):
Shadow of a Doubt (58,113 votes)
The Life & Death of Col. Blimp (12,860)
Meshes of the Afternoon (10,823)
I Walked with a Zombie (10,735)
Heaven Can Wait (9,447)
Day of Wrath (9,017)
Le Corbeau (8,813)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (8,210)
Sahara (7,797)
Jane Eyre (7,736)
IMDB classifies The Ox-Bow Incident as a 1942 film, but it would be in second place on this list, with 20,474 votes. With or without Ox-Bow, though, it’s really only Hitchcock’s noir masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt that still registers with general audiences today.
Beyond that, general audiences do appear to align with critics, at least to the extent that they’re watching 1943 films at all. Blimp and Meshes, the critics’ two favorites, are also the most popular films of the year behind Shadow and Ox-Bow, and Day of Wrath and I Walked with a Zombie also get some general-audience love as well as critical acclaim.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1943 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.)
Meshes of the Afternoon (9) 144
Shadow of a Doubt (4) 114
Day of Wrath (1) 86
Ossessione (1) 79
Life & Death of Col. Blimp (1) 64
Heaven Can Wait 57
I Walked with a Zombie 54
The Ox-Bow Incident (1) 54
For Whom the Bell Tolls 38
The Seventh Victim 31
Watch on the Rhine 18
The Song of Bernadette (1) 11
The Gang's All Here 9
Flor Silvestre 8
Le Corbeau 7
Doña Barbara 7
The Eternal Return 7
Bataan 6
Maria Calendaria 6
Five Graves to Cairo 5
Prelude to War 5
The More the Merrier 4
Hitler's Children 3
Fires Were Started 2
Les Anges du Peche 1
Our panelists offered twelve different films as write-ins - twice as many as they did in any other year this decade - but no write-in got mentioned by more than one panelist. Our scholars weren’t enamored with the films on our ballot, but they couldn’t agree on what should have been there instead.
What stands out here is the popularity of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, which wins our 1943 poll by a wider margin than Casablanca won 1942. (Meshes actually had a lead as large as Citizen Kane’s in 1941 for a while, until Shadow of a Doubt made a late run to narrow the gap.) We know from previous years that our panelists love Hitchcock, so it’s no surprise that Shadow is also extremely popular. Visconti’s Ossessione, which pioneered Italian neo-realism, comes in a surprising fourth; Col. Blimp fizzled a little with our panelists but still comes in fifth.
And further down, a shout-out for The Song of Bernadette, which got a first-place vote from one of our panelists - but only managed a single tenth-place vote with the rest of the panel combined.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There are very few obvious locks this year, but we have to start with Meshes of the Afternoon and Shadow of a Doubt, the consensus top two with our panel. Shadow is also the runaway winner with general audiences, with Meshes also in the top five.
Col. Blimp also earns a nomination: it’s the highest-ranking 1943 film on TSPDT’s list, it made Sight & Sound’s top-100 ranking, it’s the third-most viewed film of the year with general audiences - and while our panelists don’t love it quite as much, it still came in fifth with them too. Blimp becomes Powell & Pressburger’s first Moonlight nominee - but the Archers had a very strong run through the decade, so it almost certainly won’t be their last.
That leaves two spots left and several contenders: Ox-Bow Incident, Day of Wrath, Ossessione, and I Walked with a Zombie. Day of Wrath, third on TSPDT’s list and third with our panel, has the best claim, so it’s our fourth nominee. Of the final three, Ox-Bow is the most popular with general audiences, but that’s not saying much this year - so we’ll go with our panelists’ preference and give the final spot to Ossessione.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1943 are:
DAY OF WRATH
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COL. BLIMP MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON OSSESSIONE
SHADOW OF A DOUBT
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This one’s a tougher call than Citizen Kane or Casablanca, but we can narrow the field fairly quickly. Ossessione is groundbreaking, but it trails our other nominees on every metric; likewise, there’s no way to justify Day of Wrath, which also lags behind our other three nominees pretty much any way you look at it.
That leaves three films: Shadow of a Doubt, Meshes of the Afternoon, and The Life & Death of Col. Blimp, each of which rank among the year’s top five according to TSPDT, IMDB, and our expert panel. At this point, you could make a strong case for any one as the “test of time” best picture of 1943 - but our panelists clearly had two favorites of the three, so we’ll eliminate Blimp next.
And then there were two: Meshes of the Afternoon and Shadow of a Doubt. Do we favor the clear general-audience favorite (Shadow) or the clear winner with our panel (Meshes)? Do we honor Maya Deren, who’s probably the only female director we’ll be able to consider before Agnes Varda - or do we throw a bone to Hitchcock, who’s still winless despite having two more Moonlight nominations (five) than any other director?
There’s no right or wrong answer to that question. In the end, though, the general-audience gap is much larger than the gap with our panelists - so we’ll side with the clear audience favorite this time and go with Hitch. (All the better, because Alfred Hitchcock may not have another good chance to win between now and Rear Window - and that was also Seven Samurai's year, so Kurosawa's going to have something to say then, too.)
And so: congratulations to Shadow of a Doubt, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1943!
(As much as Marlene Dietrich emerged as our favorite actor of the 1930s, Joseph Cotten is apparently our favorite this decade. He's starred or co-starred in nominated films in each of the last three years, two of which have won - and he'll keep that streak of nominations going in 1944 too.)
Now that Hitchcock has his Moonlight, incidentally, every director with at least three nominations also has a win: Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, and Joseph von Sternberg. (Hitchcock, with five nominations, is the only director with more than three so far - though Chaplin is still the only director with multiple wins, for Modern Times and The Great Dictator.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1944:
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
GASLIGHT
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I
LAURA
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1943? Who should win the Moonlight for 1944? Join our community and weigh in!
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