With 1951, we enter a period of transition in cinema history. In America, Marlon Brando bursts onto the scene in A Streetcar Named Desire, bringing a wholly new approach to acting with him. In France, the great Jean Renoir makes one of his last great films (The River) while Robert Bresson releases one of his first (Diary of a Country Priest). And the initial spike of Cold War paranoia gives birth to the great age of 50s sci-fi, with memorable aliens both good (The Day the Earth Stood Still) and bad (The Thing from Another World).
The year 1951 is full of very good movies - but no one obvious standout, in contrast to many of the other years of this period. So which one film from this year has best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1951, 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
Some years, we only see one or two films that get cited on critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time - but those films get cited repeatedly, popping up on just about every list you find. With 1951, it’s exactly the other way around: quite a few films get mentioned on critics’ “best” lists, but never more than once or twice.
We start with the aforementioned Streetcar, which introduced the moviegoing world to both Brando and Tennessee Williams (not to mention Vivien Leigh as the ruined Scarlett, Blanche DuBois). The American Film Institute recognized it as one of the 50 greatest American movies ever made - just ahead of another 1951 film with a memorably coarse and rough male lead, The African Queen. The BBC’s top-100 list honored two other American tragedies, George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Billy Wilder’s still-underrated satire Ace in the Hole. Other cited films include Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock’s first great film of the decade. (He’d have several more by the time the 50s were through.)
Here’s a list of 1951 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): A Streetcar Named Desire (47), The African Queen (65)
Leonard Maltin: Strangers on a Train
National Society of Film Critics: Diary of a Country Priest
BBC American (2015): A Place in the Sun (48), Ace in the Hole (100)
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 thirteen films from 1951, a new record:
(172) The River
(233) Diary of a Country Priest
(490) Miracle in Milan
(494) Strangers on a Train
(560) Early Summer
(676) A Streetcar Named Desire
(702) A Place in the Sun
(737) The African Queen
(782) Ace in the Hole
(791) An American in Paris
(794) Othello
(852) The Day the Earth Stood Still
(984) The Thing from Another World
Here we see the six films already mentioned, plus several more, led by Jean Renoir’s Technicolor classic The River. Also worth noting further down: An American in Paris, the year’s Oscar winner, and our two early sci-fi pioneers, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World.
General Audiences
But which films from 1951 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 1951, according to IMDB (as of May 11, 2021):
Alice in Wonderland (131,037 votes)
Strangers on a Train (124,663)
A Streetcar Named Desire (100,482)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (76,803)
The African Queen (72,467)
Ace in the Hole (32,274)
An American in Paris (31,015)
The Thing from Another World (26,285)
A Christmas Carol (20,633)
A Place in the Sun (20,579)
Disney takes the top spot here with Alice in Wonderland, but after that, general audiences and critics seem to be in agreement: the next seven films below Alice all show up on TSPDT’s top 1000 as well, with Strangers and Streetcar leading the pack. Strangers and Streetcar are also the highest-ranking of those seven on TSPDT’s list too, so they’re the clear frontrunners at this point.
IMDB’s top ten list is extremely America-centric for 1951, though, so we can’t forget the foreign films we’ve mentioned - particularly Diary of a Country Priest. Bresson’s quiet classic is 13th on IMDB’s 1951 list, the highest ranking foreign-language film of the year. (Renoir’s The River, which ranks slightly higher with TSPDT’s critics, lags at 24th with general audiences.)
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1951 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.)
Strangers on a Train (4) 130
Diary of a Country Priest (7) 119
An American in Paris (2) 92
A Streetcar Named Desire (1) 90
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1) 73
Ace in the Hole (1) 68
The African Queen 63
A Place in the Sun 50
Alice in Wonderland (1) 48
The River 40
The Lavender Hill Mob (1) 30
The Man in the White Suit 20
The Thing from Another World 13
Miracle in Milan 8
On Dangerous Ground 7
The Tales of Hoffmann 6
Storm Warning 5
The Prowler 4
Go For Broke! 3
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman 3
Detective Story 2
Our scholars are also divided, but two films stand out pretty clearly: Strangers on a Train and Diary of a Country Priest are well ahead of the other choices and combine for most of the first-place votes. A Streetcar Named Desire and An American in Paris are in the second tier, followed by a cluster of The African Queen, Ace in the Hole, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. (1951 was not a year for short titles.)
Equally noteworthy here are the films our panelists did not endorse - notably The River, which was first on TSPDT’s list but barely makes the top ten here. Likewise, The Thing from Another World made the top ten with both TSPDT’s critics and IMDB’s general audiences, but finished dead last with our panel among the 13 films we shortlisted.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
It’s a very crowded field this year, and you could make a strong case for about nine films: An American in Paris, The African Queen, Ace in the Hole, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Strangers on a Train, A Streetcar Named Desire, Diary of a Country Priest, The River, and The Thing from Another World. (Alice in Wonderland would round out the top ten.) We can eliminate The River first - it ranks first with TSPDT’s critics but failed to hit with general audiences or our panelists - but that still leaves eight films with a strong claim for a nomination.
Of those eight, we can eliminate The Thing from Another World next: it’s last with our panelists, last with TSPDT’s critics, and seventh with general audiences (ahead of only Country Priest). That leaves seven.
Of those seven, Strangers on a Train ranks first with our panel, first with general audiences, and second with TSPDT’s critics, so it’s an obvious lock. Likewise, A Streetcar Named Desire is in the top four on all three of our metrics, so it earns a nomination too. And our third nomination goes to Diary of a Country Priest: it doesn’t connect as well with general audiences, but it’s a clear favorite with critics as well as our expert panelists.
That leaves two remaining nominations and four equally worthy contenders: An American in Paris, The African Queen, Ace in the Hole, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. We’ll give the next spot to An American in Paris, which our panelists clearly preferred - and we’ll let our panelists choose the fifth spot too. Of the final three contenders, The Day the Earth Stood Still came out slightly ahead with our panel - and it’s also the leader with general audiences as well. (Plus, any film that gets a shoutout in “Science Fiction/Double Feature” deserves bonus points.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1951 are:
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
With apologies to Ace in the Hole and The African Queen.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
We started with a very tight race between many deserving films, but it’s actually not too difficult to identify the winner this year. Of our five nominees, Strangers on a Train comes in first with our panelists, first with general audiences, and second with critics. Critics narrowly prefer Diary of a Country Priest, and Bresson gets a lot of love from our panelists too, but it doesn’t hit nearly as well with general audiences. A Streetcar Named Desire does score well with general audiences as well as critics - but Streetcar trails Strangers on every metric, so there’s no contest there either.
And so: congratulations to Strangers on a Train, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1951! Alfred Hitchcock finally earns his second Moonlight, his first after 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt. Three other directors have also won two Moonlights so far (Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder), but Hitchcock is still the runaway winner in nominations: he’s got eight already, twice as many as any other director, and we still haven’t gotten to Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, or Psycho yet.
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1952:
THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
HIGH NOON
IKIRU
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN
UMBERTO D.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1951? Who should win the Moonlight for 1952? Join our community and weigh in!
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