The year 1950 is known for one of the most talked-about, long-debated Oscar races in history: not just the battle for Best Actress, where Born Yesterday’s Judy Holliday upset Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson and All About Eve’s Bette Davis (deservedly, IMO!), but also the two-way showdown for Best Picture between Eve, which won, and Sunset, which (presumably) came in a close second. That race is talked-about and long-debated not just because of how close it was, but also because - in contrast with many Oscar winners - both Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve have truly stood the test of time. They’re still beloved, still celebrated, and still influential, even now, more than 70 years later.
So now let’s revisit the question. Which one film from this year has best stood the test of time? Is it still All About Eve, or has Sunset Boulevard eclipsed it? (Or is there some other film - cough, cough, Rashomon - that might challenge them both?)
To identify the Best Picture of 1950, 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
Present-day critics still love Sunset and Eve, but it’s actually Rashomon, Kurosawa’s postmodern masterpiece, that comes out on top in many surveys - most notably Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 poll of critics and directors, where Rashomon ranked among the top 30 films ever made, Sunset trailed a ways behind, and Eve failed to crack the top 100.
Sunset and Eve still get their due, though - and as in 1950, today’s critics still aren’t sure which film is better. Sunset ranks higher with Sight & Sound, the AFI’s celebrated “100 Years, 100 Movies” list, and a 2015 critics’ survey conducted by the BBC - but Eve comes out on top in surveys conducted by The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly.
Nor are Sunset and Eve the only expose-the-seedy-underbelly-of-Hollywood films that earn critical acclaim from this year! There’s also Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place, sometimes called the best noir film ever made, with Humphrey Bogart as a troubled screenwriter whose wartime experience has turned him bitter and violent. (Or enhanced his already bitter and violent tendencies? It’s never clear, but that’s noir for you.) Lonely Place slips into the BBC’s list of the best American movies ever made - ahead of All About Eve, surprisingly.
And there’s one other film that appears on multiple critics’ lists: Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel’s realist tragedy about poor kids struggling to survive in a Mexican slum. Buñuel exploded onto the film scene in the late 20s with Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, but we haven’t really encountered him since; with Olvidados, though, Buñuel reestablishes himself as a director to be reckoned with, and he’ll continue to be front of mind for most of the next quarter century. Here’s a list of 1950 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Rashomon (T26), Sunset Blvd (T63)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Rashomon (18), Sunset Blvd (T67), Los Olvidados (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Sunset Blvd (16), All About Eve (28)
Leonard Maltin: All About Eve, Sunset Blvd, Rashomon, Gun Crazy
National Society of Film Critics: All About Eve, Los Olvidados, Rashomon, Sunset Blvd, Winchester 73
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): All About Eve (52), Sunset Blvd (58)
BBC American (2015): Sunset Blvd (54), In A Lonely Place (89)
BBC Foreign (2018): Rashomon (4), Los Olvidados (80)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): All About Eve (86)
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 twelve films from 1950:
(21) Rashomon
(33) Sunset Boulevard
(129) All About Eve
(133) Los Olvidados
(274) In A Lonely Place
(349) Orpheus
(380) Stromboli
(465) The Flowers of St. Francis
(598) Wagon Master
(627) The Asphalt Jungle
(655) Un Chant d'Amour
(719) Gun Crazy
Here again, Rashomon and Sunset Boulevard are the clear leaders, with Rashomon slightly ahead; All About Eve is just behind in third, and Olvidados and Lonely Place round out the top five. (One other film is worth noting: Joseph Lewis’ noir classic Gun Crazy, which sneaks into TSPDT’s list and also gets cited by Leonard Maltin as one of his top 100 films of the twentieth century.)
General Audiences
But which films from 1950 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 1950, according to IMDB (as of May 8, 2021):
Sunset Boulevard (204,966 votes)
Rashomon (155,432)
Cinderella (148,020)
All About Eve (122,407)
Harvey (52,980)
In A Lonely Place (27,526)
The Asphalt Jungle (24,387)
Los Olvidados (18,734)
Winchester '73 (17,058)
Rio Grande (14,719)
General audiences and critics seem to be in agreement: Sunset Boulevard and Rashomon are the top two films of the year, with All About Eve just behind. Cinderella is the only other 1950 film that gets much attention from today’s audiences (it’s the most popular Disney film of the 1950s, according to IMDB), but Lonely Place and Olvidados, our other two critical hits, aren’t too far outside the top five. (Also worth noting: The Asphalt Jungle, the tenth-best film of the year according to They Shoot Pictures, and Winchester ‘73, cited by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the best movies of the century.)
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 1950 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.)
Sunset Boulevard (8) 151
Rashomon (7) 142
All About Eve (3) 119
Los Olvidados 82
In A Lonely Place 77
Orpheus 68
Gun Crazy 55
The Asphalt Jungle 51
Cinderella 49
Winchester '73 46
Born Yesterday 31
Father of the Bride 25
Harvey 7
Awara 7
Stromboli 7
Try and Get Me! 5
The Gunfighter 2
Same story as before: Sunset Boulevard and Rashomon are clearly the top two, with All About Eve locked into third. Those were also the only three films that got any first-place votes, a remarkable consensus: until now, there had never been a year where fewer than four films got at least one first-place vote from our panelists. (In fact there’s only been one other year where fewer than five films got first-place votes: 1941, when Citizen Kane dominated.)
Behind the top three, there’s no surprise: our panelists also have Los Olvidados and In A Lonely Place rounding out the top five. (And like They Shoot Pictures, our panel also has Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus in sixth. In case you’re wondering, Orpheus is 14th with general audiences.)
Breaking down that Rashomon-Sunset race a little more: of the three panelists who put All About Eve in first, two of them ranked Sunset higher than Rashomon - so in a two-way battle, Sunset Boulevard would win with our panelists 10-8.
The race is even closer than that, though! One of our scholars put Sunset in first place (10 points) and Rashomon in tenth (1 point). If you remove that one panelist, the two films would be perfectly tied, with 141 points and seven first-place votes each.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
It’s very easy this year. By all accounts, the top three films of the year (in some order) are All About Eve, Rashomon, and Sunset Boulevard, and critics and scholars agree that Los Olvidados and In A Lonely Place complete the top five. General audiences aren’t as sure about those last two spots, but Olvidados and Lonely Place both make their top eight as well, so it’s about as close to a total consensus as we’re likely to see.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1950 are:
ALL ABOUT EVE
IN A LONELY PLACE LOS OLVIDADOS
RASHOMON SUNSET BOULEVARD
With honorable mention to Cinderella, the only other 1950 film that still hits big with general audiences.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Once again, we’re going to diverge from the Oscars: All About Eve still holds up as a stone cold classic, but it’s only the third-best film of the year according to scholars, critics, and audiences alike. The top two are Rashomon and Sunset Boulevard, unquestionably - but which film comes out on top?
There’s no wrong choice here: Rashomon comes out on top (narrowly) with critics, but Sunset Boulevard leads (narrowly) among general audiences. So we’ll let our panel decide - and by the slimmest of margins, they give the edge to Billy Wilder. (It all came down to that one panelist.)
And so: congratulations to Sunset Boulevard, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1950!
Billy Wilder is now 2-for-2, having also won in 1944 for Double Indemnity; he joins Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra as the only multiple Moonlight winners to date. (Alfred Hitchcock is the runaway leader in Moonlight nominations, with seven, but his only win so far is for Shadow of a Doubt in 1943. Of course he’ll have plenty more chances this decade - but one of his best chances will be with Rear Window in 1954, and we may be inclined to honor The Seven Samurai that year to make up for snubbing Kurosawa this time.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1951:
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
(That's nomination number eight there for Hitchcock, twice as many as any other director.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1950? Who should win the Moonlight for 1951? Join our community and weigh in!
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