The year 1937 was a pivotal one in cinema history, with film’s first-ever animated feature and the first color film to be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture. In the end, the Academy honored The Life of Emile Zola with the Best Picture award - but were they right?
To identify the Best Picture of 1937, 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 are exactly two films from 1937 that appear in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and they appear repeatedly: Jean Renoir’s humanistic classic Grand Illusion and that aforementioned animated feature, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Grand Illusion gets the most critical love, most notably from the 2012 Sight & Sound survey, but Snow White ranks highly on the AFI’s list of the top 100 American films.
Here’s a list of 1937 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Grand Illusion (T73)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Grand Illusion (T59)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Snow White (34)
Leonard Maltin: Grand Illusion, Snow White
BBC Foreign (2018): Grand Illusion (36)
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 1937:
(44) Grand Illusion
(297) Make Way For Tomorrow
(302) Snow White
(414) The Awful Truth
(764) Street Angel
(948) Humanity and Paper Balloons (963) Pepe le Moko
Again, Grand Illusion and Snow White top the list, but Make Way For Tomorrow and The Awful Truth also earn significant acclaim. (Notably, both of those films were directed by the same man, Leo McCarey - who’s already earned a Moonlight for directing Duck Soup.)
General Audiences
But which 1937 films do ordinary people 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 1937, according to IMDB (as of May 8, 2020):
Snow White (174,353 votes)
Grand Illusion (32,539)
The Awful Truth (16,907)
A Day at the Races (12,564)
Lost Horizon (11,590)
Captains Courageous (8,306)
A Star Is Born (8,234)
Young & Innocent (8,210)
Way Out West (7,320)
Stage Door (7,301)
Again, Snow White and Grand Illusion are the clear top two - though when it comes to (American) audiences, Snow White is easily the most popular. General audiences also agree with critics on The Awful Truth - though not on the equally brilliant Make Way For Tomorrow, which comes in eleventh just behind Stage Door. (Make Way For Tomorrow has been overlooked since day one: when Leo McCarey won the Oscar for Best Director that year - for Awful Truth - he admonished the Academy for recognizing the wrong picture.)
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1937 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed. This year, as you’ll see, there was one particular film that got lots of write-in votes.)
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.)
Grand Illusion (11) 149
Snow White (4) 140
The Awful Truth 90
A Star Is Born 88
Pepe le Moko (1) 83
A Day at the Races 79
Make Way For Tomorrow (3) 69
Stage Door 55
Stella Dallas 46
Lost Horizon (1) 36
Way Out West 33
Captains Courageous 19
Life of Emile Zola 14
The Good Earth 9
You Only Live Once 7
History Made at Night 6
Takadanobaba Duel 5
Dead End 3
Bezhin Meadow 2
La Habanera 1
Again, Grand Illusion and Snow White are the runaway winners, with The Awful Truth a clear but distant third. Here too, Make Way For Tomorrow’s following is devoted (three first-place votes) but also small (seventh place overall).
There are some other interesting findings here too. As we’ve seen in previous years, our scholars love the Marx Brothers (A Day at the Races in sixth place) but not Laurel & Hardy (Way Out West in eleventh). IMDB users agree: Races is the fourth-most popular film of the year, but Way Out West is ninth. For some reason, the Marx Brothers hold up over time in a way that Laurel & Hardy don’t.
And perhaps the most interesting result here is the popularity of Stella Dallas, which six of our scholars included as a write-in vote - making it by far the most popular write-in candidate of the decade.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Grand Illusion and Snow White are locks. So is The Awful Truth, which comes in third or fourth on every metric. And since Stella Dallas was such a popular write-in vote among our scholars, we’ll give it the fourth spot. It’s the only film from the 1930s to earn a nomination just from write-in votes.
Make Way For Tomorrow deserves the final nomination, but we’re snubbing it because Leo McCarey is already represented by The Awful Truth. But this won’t be the end for McCarey’s overlooked classic! Yasujiro Ozu was heavily inspired by Tomorrow when he made Tokyo Story, and that’ll be a strong candidate for Best Picture in 1953.
That leaves one nomination left for either A Star Is Born, A Day at the Races, or Pepe le Moko. We’ll go with Pepe, which got a first-place vote from one of our scholars and also shows up on They Shoot Pictures’ top 1000 list. (Pepe le Moko also has a fun place in cinema history: its story of romance and intrigue in the Casbah was so popular that it got remade in the US as Algiers - and that film was so popular that the studio decided to make another film with the same formula, set in a different North African city. They called that one Casablanca.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1937 are:
THE AWFUL TRUTH
GRAND ILLUSION
PEPE LE MOKO
STELLA DALLAS SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s a two-way race, and both competitors are worthy: Grand Illusion is universally recognized as one of the greatest films of all time, while Snow White is one of the most beloved and influential.
There’s no wrong answer here - but we’ll go with Jean Renoir, to make sure he gets his proper due. (We’ll encounter Renoir again in 1939 with Rules of the Game, but 1939 is a much more crowded year.)
And so: congratulations to Grand Illusion, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1937!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1938:
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD
ALEXANDER NEVSKY BRINGING UP BABY JEZEBEL
THE LADY VANISHES
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1937? Who should win the Moonlight for 1938? Join our community and weigh in!
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