And here we arrive at the end of our third decade, and it’s a revolutionary moment to say the least. The year 1959 brings the full blossoming of the French New Wave, with debut features from François Truffaut and Alain Resnais plus another from fave auteur Robert Bresson. Meanwhile the infamous Hays Code was finally cracking, as established directors like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock gleefully flouted its stuffy demands to great acclaim. (Even the Code-friendly Christian epic Ben-Hur, famously, may or may not have had a gay relationship at its core.) But amidst all that turmoil and transformation, which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1959, 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
How good a year was 1959 for movies? Six '59 films show up in Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 critics’ list of the top 100 movies of all time; no other year had more than four. Leading the way is The 400 Blows, Truffaut’s masterpiece about youthful rebellion - but right behind it is Billy Wilder’s gender-bending Some Like It Hot, a pretty rebellious film in and of itself. The 400 Blows and Some Like It Hot rack up lots of critical accolades: Truffaut’s classic got cited by the BBC as one of the ten best foreign-language films ever made, while Some Like It Hot has been frequently ranked as one of the 25 or 30 greatest movies in history.
Not to be outdone, Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller North By Northwest made not only Sight & Sound’s top 100, but also the top 15 on the BBC’s ranking of America’s greatest films. S&S’ critics also loved Pickpocket, Robert Bresson’s psychological study of petty theft that features all his signature moves: expressionless “model” acting, meticulous attention to detail, and (for better or worse) heavily expository voiceovers. Finally, rounding out Sight & Sound’s top six are Rio Bravo, often cited as one of the greatest Westerns ever made, and Douglas Sirk’s anti-racist melodrama Imitation of Life - both of which also made the BBC’s 2015 list of the top 50 American films as well.
Here’s a list of 1959 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): The 400 Blows (T39), Some Like It Hot (T42), North by Northwest (T53), Pickpocket (T63), Rio Bravo (T63), Imitation of Life (T93)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): The 400 Blows (T13), Some Like It Hot (T37), Pickpocket (T48)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Some Like It Hot (22), North by Northwest (55), Ben-Hur (100)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Some Like It Hot (82)
Leonard Maltin: North by Northwest, The 400 Blows, Some Like It Hot
National Society of Film Critics: The 400 Blows, The World of Apu
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Some Like It Hot (47), North by Northwest (62)
BBC American (2015): North By Northwest (13), Some Like It Hot (30), Imitation of Life (37), Rio Bravo (41)
BBC Foreign (2018): The 400 Blows (8), Hiroshima Mon Amour (90)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Some Like It Hot (21), North by Northwest (29), The 400 Blows (72)
The 400 Blows, Some Like It Hot, and North By Northwest are the leaders here, each with at least five citations; no other film gets more than two. Behind those three, though, it’s a very crowded field: in addition to the films cited by Sight & Sound, we also see citations for Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu, and 1959’s actual Oscar winner, Ben-Hur.
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 fifteen films from 1959:
(24) The 400 Blows
(28) Some Like It Hot
(54) Rio Bravo
(58) North By Northwest
(79) Pickpocket
(106) Hiroshima Mon Amour
(182) Imitation of Life
(319) The World of Apu
(475) Shadows
(684) Ben-Hur
(827) Kaagaz Ke Phool
(864) Anatomy of a Murder
(888) Good Morning
(966) Floating Weeds
(976) Black Orpheus
Five 1959 films make TSPDT’s top 100, tied for the most all-time. (Four other years also have five entries: 1954, 1960, 1966, and 1975.)
TSPDT’s list mostly reproduces what we’ve already seen from critics’ lists, with a few small surprises. The 400 Blows and Some Like It Hot are the leaders, though Rio Bravo sneaks ahead of North By Northwest for third. TSPDT’s top seven movies include all six of the films cited by Sight & Sound’s critics, with Hiroshima Mon Amour slipping ahead of Imitation of Life for sixth. And TSPDT’s top ten includes all nine of the films we’ve already encountered, plus John Cassavetes’ improvisational indie Shadows.
General Audiences
But which films from 1959 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 1959, according to IMDB (as of October 29, 2021):
North By Northwest (313,479 votes)
Some Like It Hot (255,397)
Ben-Hur (229,358)
Sleeping Beauty (142,252)
The 400 Blows (111,979)
Anatomy of a Murder (63,662)
Rio Bravo (59,416)
Hiroshima Mon Amour (30,305)
House on Haunted Hill (25,661)
Pickpocket (21,169)
Ben-Hur and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty get more love from general audiences than critics, but otherwise we can see a consensus forming around which films are the best of the year. Three films, to be precise: our critics’ top three, North By Northwest, Some Like It Hot, and The 400 Blows, which also fall in the top five with general audiences.
Also making the top ten are three other films cited by critics: Rio Bravo, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Pickpocket. Several great directors released films this year, and they’re all at the top of their respective games: according to IMDB, Pickpocket is Bresson’s most popular film with today’s audiences; Hiroshima Mon Amour is Resnais’ top vote-getter, and Some Like It Hot is Wilder’s. Today’s moviegoers may favor more recent films in general, but they still love the stuff that came out in ‘59.
Back to our emerging top three: Truffaut gets less support than Hitchcock and Wilder here, but we can’t put too much stock in that - IMDB is an American website, with an audience that favors English-language movies. Comparing Truffaut with other non-English films gives us a better sense of its enduring popularity: The 400 Blows is the fourth most popular foreign-language film of the entire decade, behind only The Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, and Rashomon. (And in fact, despite IMDB’s recency bias, there are also only two foreign-language films from the 1960s with more votes: Yojimbo and 8 ½.)
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1959 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.)
The 400 Blows (2) 123
Hiroshima Mon Amour (5) 108
North By Northwest (4) 101
Pickpocket (2) 88
Imitation of Life (2) 70
Some Like It Hot (1) 70
Black Orpheus 56
Shadows 51
Anatomy of a Murder 46
Ben-Hur (1) 39
The World of Apu 36
Floating Weeds 32
Rio Bravo 25
Sleeping Beauty 24
Fires on the Plain (1) 10
Window Water Baby Moving 8
The Immoral Mr. Teas 6
The Letter Never Sent 6
Odds Against Tomorrow 3
Ride Lonesome 2
It’s Truffaut on top once again: 400 Blows only gets a couple of first-place votes, but makes up the difference (and then some) with lots of second, third, and fourth-place votes.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the snub for Some Like It Hot, which is in the top two on all our other metrics but barely scratches out a tie for fifth with our panelists. It could be worse, though: Rio Bravo is highly acclaimed by critics and comes in seventh with general audiences, but finishes next to last with our experts, just ahead of the also-snubbed Sleeping Beauty.
On the other hand, our panelists have a lot of love for Hiroshima Mon Amour, which finishes a surprising second and garners the most first-place votes. Pickpocket also overachieves with a strong fourth-place showing: our panelists clearly love the French New Wave.
And since we started by talking about the decline of the Hays Code, we should mention a couple of the lesser-known films that got write-in votes: Russ Meyer’s “nudist comedy” The Immoral Mr. Teas and Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving, a short film depicting Brakhage’s wife Jane giving birth to their daughter. (At the time, it was considered so unacceptable to film childbirth that the Kodak corporation threatened to have the negatives destroyed.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There are three obvious locks, all of which make the top five in each of our metrics: The 400 Blows, North By Northwest, and Some Like It Hot. Our panelists didn’t love Wilder, but even they still ranked Some Like It Hot in their top five.
It gets tougher after that, but we can rule out a couple contenders: Imitation of Life does well with critics and our panelists, but fails to register with general audiences; Rio Bravo scores with critics and audiences, but flopped with our panel.
That leaves three films that make the top ten in each of our metrics: Ben-Hur, Pickpocket, and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Of those, Pickpocket and Hiroshima are the clear leaders with both critics and our panelists; Ben-Hur does better with general audiences, but we can chalk up some of that advantage to IMDB’s English-language bias.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1959 are:
THE 400 BLOWS HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR NORTH BY NORTHWEST PICKPOCKET SOME LIKE IT HOT
Ben-Hur swept the Oscars, but it’ll have to settle for honorable mention here. William Wyler’s not likely to get any more nominations, which means he’ll end his career without a Moonlight - a striking indicator of how far his reputation has fallen since his heyday. Wyler was nominated for 12 Best Director Oscars and won three, but he’s only managed three Moonlight nominations (for Jezebel, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Roman Holiday) and he’s come up short every time.
That’s not to say Wyler’s no longer acclaimed, though: he’s still one of only 16 directors to earn three Moonlight nominations (including one for Jezebel, which failed to land him an Oscar nod) - and while he didn’t win, he came in a very close second with Best Years of Our Lives in 1946. (Four other directors have three Moonlight nominations and zero wins: Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vincente Minnelli, and Nicholas Ray. Not bad company.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s a three-film race this year: The 400 Blows, North By Northwest, and Some Like It Hot are all universally heralded as all-time classics; each has stood the test of time, each is beloved by critics and scholars and general moviegoers alike, and so all three are deserving of a Moonlight. But only one can win, so which will it be?
In this case, we’ll let our panelists lead the way. Some Like It Hot is a strong contender, but didn’t hit with our panel; North By Northwest is iconic (and tops with general audiences), but generally lags behind 400 Blows in most of our metrics. Truffaut’s classic is first with critics and a clear first with our panel; it trails Hitch and Wilder in raw general-audience votes, but its high status with moviegoers is clearer once you adjust for IMDB’s American bias.
And besides, Hitch and Wilder have each won multiple Moonlights already, and both men will have more chances in the 1960s. We’ll see Truffaut again with films like Jules et Jim and Day For Night, but this is almost certainly his best chance to win a Moonlight - so we can make that happen.
And so: congratulations to The 400 Blows, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1959!
Truffaut wins on his first nomination, fittingly beating out four directors who all have multiple nods. Alain Resnais is now 0-for-2, though we’ll see him again in 1961 when Last Year at Marienbad rolls around; Robert Bresson is 0-for-3, but he may get another shot in 1966 with Au Hasard Balthazar.
As for Wilder and Hitchcock - we’ll see them again very, very shortly.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1960:
THE APARTMENT L’AVVENTURA
BREATHLESS
LA DOLCE VITA
PSYCHO
No rest for Hitch and Wilder! The Apartment is Wilder’s fourth nomination, moving him into a five-way tie for second all-time with Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. Hitchcock is the runaway leader in nominations, though: Psycho is his twelfth, three times as many as anyone else. (He’s also the all-time leader in Moonlight wins, with three.) Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni get their first nominations - but not their last - for Breathless and L’Avventura.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1959? Who should win the Moonlight for 1960? Join our community and weigh in!
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