The Oscars loved Frank Capra in the 1930s: just four years after honoring It Happened One Night as the year’s best picture, they honored him again by recognizing You Can’t Take It With You as the top film of 1938. We agreed with Oscar in 1934 - will we do it again this time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1938, 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
No standouts this year, but the 1938 film that shows up the most in critics’ all-time “best” lists is the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, which made both the AFI’s 2007 list and the BBC’s 2015 list of the top 100 American films. The Adventures of Robin Hood also gets multiple mentions. And critics also occasionally cite Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Olympia, the slightly less infamous of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries.
Here’s a list of 1938 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Bringing Up Baby (88)
Leonard Maltin: Adventures of Robin Hood, The Lady Vanishes
National Society of Film Critics: Bringing Up Baby
BBC American (2015): Bringing Up Baby (83)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Adventures of Robin Hood (46), Olympia (84)
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 eight films from 1938:
(125) Bringing Up Baby
(492) Alexander Nevsky
(608) The Lady Vanishes
(763) The Adventures of Robin Hood
(786) Olympia
(815) Port of Shadows
(878) La Bete Humaine
(992) Holiday
Bringing Up Baby is the clear leader here, but Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky joins Lady Vanishes, Robin Hood, and Olympia in the top five.
General Audiences
But which 1938 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 1938, according to IMDB (as of May 24, 2020):
Bringing Up Baby (53,129 votes)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (45,670)
The Lady Vanishes (45,311)
You Can’t Take It With You (22,366)
Angels With Dirty Faces (19,192)
Holiday (13,707) Jezebel (11,493)
Alexander Nevsky (10,134)
Port of Shadows (7,891)
Pygmalion (7,576)
There’s a clear top three: Bringing Up Baby in first again, followed closely by Robin Hood and Lady Vanishes, with You Can’t Take It With You in a very distant fourth.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 11 films from 1938 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.)
Bringing Up Baby (8) 159
The Lady Vanishes (2) 114
Alexander Nevsky (1) 107
Jezebel (2) 105
The Adventures of Robin Hood (2) 103
Port of Shadows (1) 77
Olympia (1) 69
Holiday (2) 68
Angels with Dirty Faces (1) 61
You Can’t Take It With You 47
Pygmalion 29
The River 8
La Bete Humaine 5
J’Accuse 5
They Drive By Night 5
Love Finds Andy Hardy 3
Hotel du Nord 2
Nine different films get first-place votes, but here again the runaway winner is Bringing Up Baby. It’s a tight four-way race for second, but there’s definitely a clear top five, with a big gap between Robin Hood in fifth place and Port of Shadows in sixth. The Lady Vanishes, Robin Hood, and Alexander Nevsky are all in the top five again, joined this time by Bette Davis’ Oscar-winning turn in Jezebel.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
This time it’s pretty easy. Bringing Up Baby, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Lady Vanishes are all obvious locks; so is Alexander Nevsky, though it doesn’t get quite as many general-audience votes. You could make a case for Olympia, Port of Shadows, or Holiday as the fifth nominee, but we’ll go with our scholars and give the last spot to Jezebel.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1938 are:
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD ALEXANDER NEVSKY
BRINGING UP BABY JEZEBEL
THE LADY VANISHES
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This is one of those rare years where it’s easy not only to pick five nominees, but also to choose the winner. There are numerous great films from 1938, including several that didn’t make our top five - but Bringing Up Baby ranks first among critics, first among general audiences, and first by a landslide among our panel of scholars. (Personally I think Holiday is the better 1938 Hepburn/Grant screwball comedy - and so do at least two of our panelists - but we're definitely in the minority.)
And so: congratulations to Bringing Up Baby, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1938!
And here are our nominees (you know you’ve been waiting for this one) for Best Picture of 1939:
GONE WITH THE WIND
MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
THE RULES OF THE GAME
STAGECOACH
THE WIZARD OF OZ
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1938? Who should win the Moonlight for 1939? Join our community and weigh in!
Comments