We’ve reached the mid-1950s, and everything is changing. In Hollywood, the domination of the Hays Code is cracking as the film industry pushes back against McCarthyist censorship. In Asia, the Japanese film industry is reaching its pinnacle as Akira Kurosawa takes the samurai genre to an entirely new level. And in Europe, an iconic Italian filmmaker releases his first classic - though there will be many more to come. There are a lot of great contenders from 1954 - and some that shoulda been - but which one film from this year has best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1954, 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
As it turns out, 1954 in film is a bit like a sports team being carried by one or two superstars: the bench really isn’t that deep, but the legends alone are enough to make it a champion.
Two films in particular stand out, polar opposites in scope: Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, the sprawling three-hour epic that redefined the samurai film, the war film, and the action film simultaneously; and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the brilliantly contained study of voyeurism, isolation, and paranoia in 50s-era gesellschaft New York that takes place almost entirely in one man’s bedroom. Both films are almost universally recognized as among the greatest ever made - so much so that it’s more noteworthy when they don’t appear on critics’ “all-time best” lists than when they do.
Behind Rear Window and Seven Samurai, there are a few other films that show up regularly on critics’ “best” lists - including two Italian films, Federico Fellini’s tragedy La Strada and Roberto Rosselini’s influential Journey to Italy. The US and Japan have other entries as well: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront still earns critical acclaim today, as does Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff.
Here’s a list of 1954 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Seven Samurai (17), Journey to Italy (41), Rear Window (T53), Sansho the Bailiff (T59)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Seven Samurai (17), La Strada (T26), Rear Window (T48), Journey to Italy (T67)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): On the Waterfront (19), Rear Window (48)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Rear Window (72), Seven Samurai (73)
Leonard Maltin: On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
National Society of Film Critics: On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai, La Strada
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Rear Window (49), On the Waterfront (80), Seven Samurai (100)
BBC American (2015): Johnny Guitar (64)
BBC Foreign (2018): Seven Samurai (1), Sansho the Bailiff (61), La Strada (83)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Seven Samurai (17), On the Waterfront (44)
Seven Samurai has the edge over Rear Window here: Sight & Sound’s critics and directors both put Kurosawa in their top 20 with Hitch a little further back; a 2018 BBC survey ranked Samurai as the greatest foreign-language film ever made; and Rear Window gets a couple noteworthy snubs - most notably from the BBC, which ranked Nicholas Ray’s feminist Western Johnny Guitar as a better American film.
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 eleven films from 1954:
(10) Seven Samurai
(41) Rear Window
(67) La Strada
(74) Journey to Italy
(91) Sansho the Bailiff
(158) On the Waterfront
(246) Johnny Guitar
(439) A Star is Born
(467) Senso
(934) Chikamatsu Monogatari
(962) Touchez Pas Au Grisbi
Only eleven 1954 films made TSPDT’s top-1000 list, fewer than any year since 1949; in fact not until 1978 will we see another year with fewer than 11 films. But remarkably, five 1954 films make the top 100, more than twice as many as any year to date. No other year has more than five films in TSPDT’s top 100; 1954 shares the record with 1959, 1960, 1966, and 1975.
Again: not a deep bench this year, but the superstars shine bright.
General Audiences
But which films from 1954 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 1954, according to IMDB (as of June 26, 2021):
Rear Window (454,325 votes)
Seven Samurai (322,768)
Dial M For Murder (162,446)
On the Waterfront (145,146)
Sabrina (60,786)
La Strada (59,467)
White Christmas (34,808)
Godzilla (30,835)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (30,257)
Creature from the Black Lagoon (27,522)
Once again, Rear Window and Seven Samurai stand out; in fact these are two of the most-watched films of the entire decade, according to IMDB. (Rear Window is second only to 12 Angry Men; Seven Samurai is fourth behind Vertigo.) Rear Window is also the second-most watched Hitchcock film of all time, behind only Psycho.
Likewise, Seven Samurai is far and away Kurosawa’s most popular film, with more than twice as many votes as his second-most watched film, Rashomon. In fact IMDB ranks Seven Samurai as the fourth-most watched Japanese film of all time - trailing only three much more recent films, all from Hayao Miyazaki: Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle. (IMDB also has a recency bias - the newer a film is, the more votes it's likely to have - so it’s noteworthy that a 1954 film still ranks that high.)
Behind those two, general audiences also share the critics’ love for On the Waterfront and La Strada - but not so much Sansho the Bailiff (17th place) or Journey to Italy (20th). The popularity of La Strada and Seven Samurai is worth emphasizing: most IMDB users are American, so American and English-language films will tend to get more votes - so it’s especially impressive when a foreign-language film emerges from the pack. (See also Godzilla, a bit further back in eighth place.)
Two other films worth noting outside the top 10: A Star is Born and Johnny Guitar are in a virtual tie, with A Star is Born in 14th place and Johnny Guitar just a few hundred votes behind in 15th. (Spoiler alert: this may be relevant information later.)
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1954 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, in fact, miss Godzilla this year.)
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.)
Rear Window (6) 150
The Seven Samurai (2) 116
La Strada (2) 91
On the Waterfront (2) 86
Johnny Guitar (1) 83
A Star is Born 74
Sansho the Bailiff (2) 71
Journey to Italy (2) 69
Dial M For Murder 37
The Caine Mutiny (1) 21
Sabrina 28
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers 17
Godzilla 13
Senso 7
Aventurera 7
Magnificent Obsession 6
Salt of the Earth 6
Touchez Pas Au Grisbi 5
The Barefoot Contessa 2
Carmen Jones 2
(Aventurera is typically considered a 1950 film, but one of our panelists named it here.)
Once again, Rear Window and Seven Samurai are our clear top two, with Rear Window claiming the edge this time. (Rear Window also got seven second-place votes; Seven Samurai got four second-place votes and five third-place votes.) La Strada and On the Waterfront lead the rest of the pack, with Johnny Guitar putting up a surprisingly good fifth-place showing just behind.
One interesting detail: there's a strong overall consensus that Rear Window and Seven Samurai are the top two from 1954, but individuals don’t necessarily agree. Of our 18 expert panelists, only four ranked Rear Window and Seven Samurai as their top two.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Rear Window and Seven Samurai are obvious locks, and so are La Strada and On the Waterfront. Those were the top four with our expert panelists and they’re all among the top six with critics and general audiences too.
That leaves one more spot and four films that could claim it: Johnny Guitar, Journey to Italy, A Star is Born, and Sansho the Bailiff. None of those four do particularly well with present-day audiences, but they all make TSPDT’s top-1000 list and they all got significant support from our panelists. You could make a case for any of them, but we’ll go with our panelists and give the fifth spot to Nicholas Ray: Johnny Guitar holds up nicely as a smart anti-McCarthy allegory, and it also boasts two of the Western genre’s most iconic female leads. (Plus when Joan Crawford’s pointing a gun at you, it’s kinda hard to say no.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1954 are:
JOHNNY GUITAR
ON THE WATERFRONT
REAR WINDOW
SEVEN SAMURAI
LA STRADA
If you’re keeping score, Rear Window is Alfred Hitchock’s ninth Moonlight-nominated film. No other director has more than four.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
The only two films with a legitimate claim to this year’s Moonlight are Rear Window and Seven Samurai - but before we get to them, let’s also recognize On the Waterfront. One thing we’ve learned in this project is that movies typically don’t stand the test of time if they’re on the wrong side of history; your film has to be truly undeniably great art if it’s still going to hold up decades later with an outdated political message. (See also Gone With The Wind and Triumph of the Will, which also earned Moonlight nods for their respective years.) On the Waterfront is a thinly-veiled pro-McCarthy movie, celebrating Brando’s Terry Malloy for having the courage to name names; it’s akin to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, another film where a great director defends himself for having taken a reprehensible position in the recent past. But like Intolerance (not to mention Birth of a Nation, the reprehensible position Griffith was trying to defend), Elia Kazan’s magnum opus still holds up artistically nonetheless. Up to now, our nominations have all gone to anti-McCarthy movies like High Noon and Johnny Guitar, but On the Waterfront earns a spot too, despite being firmly on the wrong side.
Now to the main event: Rear Window or Seven Samurai? There’s no wrong answer here: both films are timeless classics, both are influential, both are universally hailed by critics and scholars alike, and both have retained their popularity with general audiences, even after nearly seven decades. You can’t go wrong either way - so we’ll take the opportunity to recognize Akira Kurosawa, a director who’s come up just short twice already (with 1950’s Rashomon and 1952’s Ikiru) and may not have a better chance to win again.
And so: congratulations to Seven Samurai, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1954!
Kurosawa wins on his third nomination. Alfred Hitchcock is now just 2-for-9 in Moonlight wins, but he’ll have another very good chance in 1958, when Vertigo comes around. (Not to mention North by Northwest and Psycho, in 1959 and 1960.)
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1955:
LES DIABOLIQUES
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
ORDET
PATHER PANCHALI
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
Nicholas Ray (Rebel) and Carl Theodor Dreyer (Ordet) earn their third nominations here; both are winless so far, though Dreyer likely would win for Passion of Joan of Arc in 1928 if we went back that far. Vincente Minnelli and William Wyler are the only other directors with three nominations and no wins; nobody is 0-for-4 so far, though it took Hitchcock five nominations to get his first win.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1954? Who should win the Moonlight for 1955? Join our community and weigh in!
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