The year is 1962, and the French New Wave is at its zenith. François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard lead the way with Jules et Jim and Vivre Sa Vie, but over on the Left Bank, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker are producing some classics of their own too. In America, it’s still the age of the Western, but it’s also a time of Cold War paranoia - not to mention a long overdue reckoning with racial injustice. And of course all of those works and social trends are dwarfed, quite literally, by David Lean’s massive, sweeping, 200-plus minute biopic Lawrence of Arabia, still arguably the most epic epic ever made. But which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1962, 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
Lawrence of Arabia is frequently cited as one of the greatest epics ever made; sometimes critics go further and call it one of the all-time greatest films, period. Most notably, the American Film Institute ranked Lawrence as one of the ten best American movies ever made - a strange move only given how very British it was.
But for 1962, Lawrence of Arabia is just the tip of the iceberg. We found no less than four French New Wave films that made critics’ “all-time best” lists - led by a short film, Chris Marker’s avant-garde sci-fi classic La Jetée, which made Sight and Sound’s prestigious 2012 list of the greatest movies ever made. Beyond that, we also found citations for Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie.
Here’s a list of 1962 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): La Jetée (T50), L’Eclisse (T73), Lawrence of Arabia (T81)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Lawrence of Arabia (T48), L’Eclisse (T48), Vivre Sa Vie (T67)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Lawrence of Arabia (7), To Kill A Mockingbird (25)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Lawrence of Arabia (50)
Leonard Maltin: Lawrence of Arabia
National Society of Film Critics: Lawrence of Arabia
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): To Kill A Mockingbird (16), Lawrence of Arabia (23)
BBC American (2015): The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (45)
BBC Foreign (2018): Cléo from 5-7 (44), Jules et Jim (55), The Exterminating Angel (67), L’Eclisse (70), La Jetée (86)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Lawrence of Arabia (76)
The BBC loved the French New Wave, apparently.
1962 is another year full of great movies that have stood the test of time. In addition to the five films we’ve already mentioned, we also found citations for To Kill A Mockingbird, L’Eclisse, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Exterminating Angel. Antonioni’s L’Eclisse boasts the best resume of those four, making Sight & Sound’s top 100 as well as the BBC’s.
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 here, the year is better represented. TSPDT’s list includes an astonishing twenty-two films from 1962, a new record:
(32) Lawrence of Arabia
(82) Jules et Jim
(93) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(110) L'Eclisse
(117) La Jetée
(127) Vivre Sa Vie
(156) The Exterminating Angel
(239) Cléo from 5 to 7
(288) An Autumn Afternoon
(356) To Kill A Mockingbird
(377) Salvatore Giuliano
(428) Ivan's Childhood
(508) Winter Light
(569) Hatari!
(620) The Manchurian Candidate
(687) Lolita
(706) Harakiri
(713) The Trial
(903) Knife in the Water
(928) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(951) Ride the High Country
(964) Carnival of Souls
Not until 1975 will we see another year with that many films in the top 1000.
There’s Lawrence of Arabia on top again, followed closely by Jules et Jim, with our other New Wave films not too far behind. We found nine 1962 films that got cited on various top-100 lists; all nine also make TSPDT’s top ten, with Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon slipping in ahead of To Kill A Mockingbird. Highlights further back include the Cold War paranoia thriller The Manchurian Candidate, Stanley Kubrick’s scandalous Lolita - and sneaking into the top 1000, the cult classic Carnival of Souls.
General Audiences
But which films from 1962 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 1962, according to IMDB (as of December 10, 2021):
To Kill A Mockingbird (306,449 votes)
Lawrence of Arabia (282,069)
Dr. No (159,767)
Lolita (97,887)
The Manchurian Candidate (73,945)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (73,311)
The Longest Day (54,285)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (53,529)
Harakiri (50,601)
Jules et Jim (40,007)
Welcome to the party, James Bond.
Lawrence of Arabia is still beloved by general audiences; it’s second only to Mockingbird in 1962 and it’s also the seventh most-viewed film of the decade. (To Kill A Mockingbird is sixth.) There’s a big gap after those two, but five other films from TSPDT’s list also make the top ten here: Lolita, The Manchurian Candidate, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Harakiri, and Jules et Jim.
IMDB users tend to be American, so English-language films have a built-in advantage - which makes it especially noteworthy that Harakiri and Jules et Jim make the top ten. We should also mention several foreign-language films that made IMDB’s top twenty, all of which also show up on TSPDT’s list: Ivan's Childhood (34,802), La Jetée (32,158), The Exterminating Angel (32,152), Vivre Sa Vie (30,382), Knife in the Water (21,350), and Cléo from 5 to 7 (20,341).
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1962 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. Trying to limit the list to 15, we did in fact exclude a couple significant films this year, most notably Harakiri.)
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.)
Jules et Jim (4) 136
Lawrence of Arabia (5) 130
Cléo from 5 to 7 (6) 121
La Jetée (3) 117
The Exterminating Angel (2) 102
The Manchurian Candidate (1) 82
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 71
L'Eclisse (1) 69
Lolita 66
To Kill A Mockingbird 62
Vivre Sa Vie (1) 60
Knife in the Water 51
Dr. No 33
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? 26
An Autumn Afternoon 18
Carnival of Souls (1) 15
The Longest Day 10
The Intruder 9
Ivan's Childhood 8
The Miracle Worker 8
Ride the High Country 7
The Trial 7
The Third Lover 5
Cape Fear 4
Divorce Italian Style 4
Two Weeks in Another Town 4
Confessions of an Opium Eater 3
Gypsy 3
The Music Man 3
Days of Wine and Roses 2
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 2
Mutiny on the Bounty 1
Seventeen films got write-in votes, but Harakiri got none; guess I shouldn’t have worried. Autumn Afternoon and Carnival of Souls turned out to be our biggest snubs.
There’s a clear top four with our panel, with Jules, Lawrence, Cléo, and Jetée combining for 18 of 24 first-place votes. Cléo gets the most first-place votes with six, but Jules et Jim is our winner on points, narrowly edging out Lawrence of Arabia. Interestingly, Jules et Jim didn’t get many second-place votes either; it muscled its way to the top with lots of third- and fourth-place votes. Cléo is this year’s cult classic, as it turns out: it got the most first-place votes and tied for the most second-place votes, but eight of our panelists left it off their lists entirely.
And unsurprisingly, our panelists are mostly in line with critics: all nine of the films we found on critics’ “best” lists also made our panel’s top 11, with Lolita and Manchurian Candidate joining the fray. We also shortlisted some films that were more popular and less critically-acclaimed (Dr. No and The Longest Day), but our panel didn’t go for them.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
The two most obvious locks are Lawrence of Arabia and Jules et Jim: those are the top two with our panelists as well as TSPDT’s critical aggregate, and they both punch above their weight with general audiences too.
We’ll go with our panel for our next two spots - very happily, because both Cléo from 5 to 7 and La Jetée constitute historic nominations. Cléo, directed by the great Agnès Varda, is only the third female-directed film to earn a Moonlight nod, after 1935’s Triumph of the Will and 1943’s Meshes of the Afternoon. La Jetée, meanwhile, is only the third short film to get nominated, after 1956’s Night and Fog and (again!) Meshes of the Afternoon. So far, François Truffaut is the only French New Wave director to win a Moonlight (for The 400 Blows in 1959), but the artsier Left Bank New Wavers have been more consistent at racking up the nominations: we’re honoring Agnès Varda and Chris Marker this year for their first major works, and Alain Resnais has three nominations already. (Including one for Night & Fog, on which Chris Marker served as assistant director. Marker was pretty good at this whole short-film thing.)
That leaves one more spot and a whole mess of films that could claim it. Even if we narrow the field to those nine films that got critical citations, how can we choose between The Exterminating Angel, To Kill A Mockingbird, Vivre Sa Vie, L’Eclisse, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? (And how can you leave out The Manchurian Candidate?) Liberty Valance has the edge on TSPDT’s aggregate, L’Eclisse gets the most critical citations, Exterminating Angel leads with our panelists, and you could make a case for any of those three - but general audiences have a pretty overwhelming preference for To Kill A Mockingbird, and we think that gap is big enough to be decisive.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1962 are:
CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7
LA JETÉE
JULES ET JIM
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Which film is the last one left out? That would almost certainly be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is one of only two films (with Lawrence) to make the top nine on each of our three metrics - but doesn’t score highly enough to overtake our top five.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
We don’t have to draw out the suspense too much. Lawrence of Arabia is first on TSPDT’s ranking, a close second with general audiences, and a close second with our panel - and for good measure, it also got the most citations on critics’ “best” lists as well. It doesn’t sweep all of our categories - we haven’t seen that since Singin’ in the Rain - but it’s about as close to a consensus number-one as we’ve had in years.
And so: congratulations to Lawrence of Arabia, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1962!
David Lean wins on his third nomination. More notably, Lawrence of Arabia becomes just the third film to win both the Moonlight and the Best Picture Oscar, joining 1934’s It Happened One Night and 1942’s Casablanca (which actually won the Oscar for ‘43). It’s been twenty years since we’ve had an Oscar/Moonlight double winner - but there have been quite a few near misses, like The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, All About Eve in 1950, On the Waterfront in 1954, Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, The Apartment in 1960, and West Side Story in 1961. (And we may not have to wait long for our next double winner: in the next ten years we’ll see The Sound of Music, Midnight Cowboy, and of course The Godfather.)
One interesting side note on Lawrence’s win: our panelists, and film scholars in general, have noticeably soured on classic movies with outdated racial politics (#GoneWithTheWind), but critics and scholars seem to be more forgiving of films that feature brownface and yellowface, or white actors playing nonwhite roles. Just in the last five years, we’ve seen nominations for Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, Touch of Evil, and (most notoriously) Breakfast at Tiffany’s; each one features casting choices that wouldn’t fly today, but that doesn’t seem to have affected their reputation too much. (In Lawrence’s case, at least, it doesn’t hurt that Alec Guinness was absolutely at the top of his game. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I have less of an explanation for- but then again, hey, I still like that movie too.)
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1963:
THE BIRDS
CONTEMPT
8 1/2
THE GREAT ESCAPE THE LEOPARD
As promised earlier, 1963 will be a rehash of 1960, with Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean-Luc Godard leading the pack. Hitchcock’s Psycho edged Godard’s Breathless and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in 1960; Fellini’s likely the favorite this time with 8 1/2, but The Birds will probably have the edge with general audiences and Contempt could be a favorite with our New Wave-loving panelists.
And a happy return to Luchino Visconti, who gets his second nomination for The Leopard - his first in two decades, after 1943’s Ossessione. Visconti ties Luis Buñuel for the longest gap between nominations; Buñuel also went twenty years between 1930’s L’Age d’Or and 1950’s Los Olvidados.
Remarkably, The Leopard also marks Burt Lancaster’s first nomination, after being passed over for From Here to Eternity and Sweet Smell of Success; it’s also Alain Delon’s first nomination, after Rocco and His Brothers missed our cut in 1960. (Claudia Cardinale also hadn’t been in a Moonlight-nominated film prior to 1963, but she’s making up for that in a big way, with key roles in both The Leopard and 8 1/2.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1962? Who should win the Moonlight for 1963? Join our community and weigh in!
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