I was chatting recently with a friend about this project and we got to talking about specific years. “Oh, 1939,” he said, “that’ll be an easy one, right? Gone with the Wind for sure, right?”
“Um, well…”
To identify the Best Picture of 1939, 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
1939 has a reputation for being the great year in film history, but we only found six movies from the year that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists. And when it comes to critical acclaim, there’s a clear top three: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Jean Renoir’s classic The Rules of the Game.
Rules is frequently considered one of the greatest films ever made; in Sight & Sound’s 2012 critics’ survey, it ranks as the fourth-best film of all time. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, meanwhile, rank as two of the greatest American films of all time, and they’re certainly two of the most popular as well. Both movies made the American Film Institute’s all-time top ten in 2007, and they also made the all-time top ten in a 2014 Harris public-opinion survey. (Gone with the Wind ranked first in that poll.)
Three other 1939 films also get mentioned in critics’ lists, most notably Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Jimmy Stewart filibusters his way into the AFI’s top 30 and Entertainment Weekly’s top 50. Stagecoach, the first great John Ford/John Wayne Western, earns a mention in the BBC’s 2015 list of the 100 greatest American movies. And Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum slips into the BBC’s 2018 list of the top 100 non-English-language films - along with Rules of the Game, which makes the top ten again.
Here’s a list of 1939 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Rules of the Game (4)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Rules of the Game (T22)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Gone with the Wind (6), The Wizard of Oz (10), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (26)
Harris poll (2014): Gone with the Wind (1), The Wizard of Oz (8)
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): The Wizard of Oz (2), Gone with the Wind (15)
Leonard Maltin: Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz
National Society of Film Critics: Gone With The Wind, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Rules of the Game, Wizard of Oz
BBC American (2015): The Wizard of Oz (34), Stagecoach (77), Gone with the Wind (97)
BBC Foreign (2018): Rules of the Game (5), Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (88)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Gone With The Wind (10), Wizard of Oz (28), Rules of the Game (39), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (45)
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies of all time, though. (The Harris poll only lists the top 10.) 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 ten films from 1939:
(4) Rules of the Game
(105) The Wizard of Oz
(107) Gone with the Wind
(136) Stagecoach (233) Only Angels Have Wings
(260) Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
(548) Ninotchka
(664) Young Mr. Lincoln
(688) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(919) Daybreak
When it comes to critical acclaim, Rules of the Game is the clear leader, with Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz trailing just a bit behind.
Interestingly, in spite of 1939’s reputation as the greatest year in movie history, there’s only one 1939 film that makes TSPDT’s top 100, and only ten that make the top 1000. To put that into perspective, there are four years where five films make the top 100: 1959, 1960, 1966, and 1975. Judging only from TSPDT’s rankings, you could argue that the greatest year in movie history is not 1939 but 1975: Mirror, Barry Lyndon, Jeanne Dielman, Nashville, and Jaws all make the top 100, and another 18 films make the top 1000 from that same year. Eat your heart out, ‘39.
General Audiences
But which 1939 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 1939, according to IMDB (as of May 29, 2020):
The Wizard of Oz (363,878 votes)
Gone with the Wind (278,695)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (103,092)
Stagecoach (41,267)
Rules of the Game (25,701)
Ninotchka (18,179)
Wuthering Heights (15,724)
The Roaring Twenties (12,271)
The Women (12,114)
Only Angels Have Wings (11,917)
According to IMDB, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind are not only the two most-watched films of 1939, but also the two most-watched films of the entire decade. Mr. Smith is locked into third place, distantly followed by Stagecoach and Rules of the Game; the five films that critics cite most often are also the five favorites among general audiences. (Story of the Last Chrysanthemum ranks 41st on IMDB’s list, though that’s probably artificially low: IMDB users are predominantly American, so non-English-language films tend not to get as many votes. Rules of the Game is the rare exception.)
But what do film scholars think?
Oh, you’re gonna love this.
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1939 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.) We have twenty panelists for the 1930s, but there are more than 20 first-place votes because two of our panelists split their votes among several films. (One of our panelists had a five-way tie for first. It’s just that kind of year.)
Rules of the Game (11) 160
The Wizard of Oz (6) 147
Stagecoach 102
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (2) 96
Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (2) 92
Ninotchka (2) 82
Gone with the Wind (1) 69
Daybreak 61
Wuthering Heights (1) 40
The Women 32
Only Angels Have Wings 26
Hunchback of Notre Dame 22
Young Mr. Lincoln 20
Destry Rides Again 18
Goodbye Mr. Chips 16
Dark Victory 9
The Roaring Twenties 5
Gulliver’s Travels 5
Gunga Din 3
(It’s only in this moment that I realize just how many “Mr.” movies there were in 1939.)
Easily the most shocking result of the decade: our panel of film scholars absolutely rejected Gone with the Wind. Only seven of our 20 panelists even put GWTW in their top five; the only first-place vote came from the scholar who had a five-way tie; and one of our panelists explicitly refused to vote for GWTW because it was “racist propaganda.” (She said the same about Triumph of the Will.)
Like Birth of a Nation before it, Gone with the Wind endorses and reinforces the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War: an image of noble white Southerners (aided by their mostly-happy black slaves) bravely but vainly defending their civilized way of life against a hostile invading force, then courageously fighting to reestablish that way of life in the aftermath of the devastation. The Lost Cause story was a phony myth, deliberately cooked up in the late nineteenth century by Southern leaders and historians to justify their efforts to reimpose a white-supremacist regime. But it came to be accepted as gospel for the first half of the twentieth century - and that in turn influenced the way Hollywood understood and depicted the Civil War.
Sometimes this manifested itself in subtle ways: the hero of most Western movies, for instance, is typically an ex-Confederate soldier. (The Western genre also reinforces a common trope of the “birth of a nation” myth, namely ex-Confederate soldiers and ex-Union soldiers setting aside their differences and teaming up against hostile Indians. Quentin Tarantino skewers this trope in The Hateful Eight - where the “setting aside our differences” moment ultimately comes between an ex-Confederate and a black man, and the hostile targets are white, not Indian.) Buster Keaton took this to a different level when making The General: that film is based on a real-life train heist that was actually conducted by Union soldiers, but Keaton made his hero a Confederate because he believed (possibly correctly) that American audiences in 1926 would not accept a Union soldier as a hero. American audiences did accept one prominent Union hero: Abraham Lincoln, in films like Young Mr. Lincoln. But this too was a Lost-Cause version of Lincoln, not the Great Emancipator but a Great Uniter who only wanted to see Northern and Southern whites getting along again. (On Southern terms, of course.) In 1941, Orson Welles showed us a young Charles Foster Kane shouting “The Union forever!” while playing in the snow, and that’s about as anti-Confederate as the pictures were willing to get.
But Gone with the Wind doesn’t just passively accept the Lost Cause myth; instead, like Birth of a Nation, it actively embraces it, and it does so very well. In Westerns, and in films like The General, the Lost Cause myth informs the plot but mostly lurks in the background; in GWTW the myth is central and essential, from start to finish. So when later historians exploded the Lost Cause fantasy, they exploded Gone with the Wind too. Today’s film scholars are apt to study GWTW in the same way that they study Birth of a Nation: a groundbreaking film, highly influential, well-made, well-acted, impossible to ignore, but also corrupt and rotten at its core.
What that means for us: Gone with the Wind comes in a distant seventh among our panelists.
Our panel is much more sanguine on Rules of the Game and Wizard of Oz, the other two films in 1939’s Big Three. They’re far and away our top vote-getters, and sixteen of our twenty panelists had one or the other as their top choice. (Including our five-way-tie panelist, who put both films at number one - along with Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, in case you’re wondering.)
Behind Rules and Wizard, there’s a three-way fight for third between Stagecoach, Mr. Smith, and Last Chrysanthemum, with the Greta Garbo comedy Ninotchka trailing just a bit behind in sixth. (“Greta Garbo comedy” still feels like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?) Gone with the Wind is well behind Ninotchka in seventh, and after that the only film that gets significant support is Marcel Carné’s Daybreak. (Another film that’s faded over time is Wuthering Heights, which made the AFI’s original top 100 list back in 1998 but barely makes the top ten for its own year today.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
1939 has a great reputation, but in the end there are only seven films worth considering: Rules of the Game, Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, and Story of the Last Chrysanthemum. Those are the top seven vote-getters among our panel; they’re the only films that get mentioned on critics’ all-time “best” lists; and they all rank in They Shoot Pictures’ top nine (along with Young Mr. Lincoln and Only Angels Have Wings). Among general audiences, Last Chrysanthemum isn’t as well known, but the other six are the top six vote-getters of the year on IMDB.
So how do we narrow it down from seven to five?
Rules of the Game and Wizard of Oz are locks - and so is Gone with the Wind, in spite of itself. GWTW does poorly with our panel, but it still ranks highly among critics and it’s one of the two most popular films of the year among general audiences (with Wizard). Stagecoach also merits a nomination: it’s fourth on TSPDT’s list, fourth with general audiences, and third among our panelists.
That leaves one more spot and three candidates: Ninotchka, Last Chrysanthemum, and Mr. Smith. We can eliminate Ninotchka first: it narrowly leads Mr. Smith on TSPDT’s ranking, but trails on critics’ lists, general-audience votes, and our scholarly panel. And while Mr. Smith and Last Chrysanthemum are about equally beloved by critics and scholars, Mr. Smith is definitely the more popular of the two: it ranks third among general audiences, whereas Last Chrysanthemum ranks forty-first.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1939 are:
GONE WITH THE WIND
MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
THE RULES OF THE GAME
STAGECOACH
THE WIZARD OF OZ
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
If you’d asked me when we started this project, I would have said I expected 1939 to be a three-way battle between Rules of the Game, Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind. Two out of three ain’t bad?
Gone with the Wind is still extremely popular with general audiences, and if we’d done this project even ten years ago, I suspect it might have done better with our panelists. But the Lost Cause appears to have finally lost - or at least it’s losing right now - and so a movie like GWTW, inescapably bound to the Lost Cause myth, is seeing its reputation fade. (See also Birth of a Nation, which made the AFI’s top 50 back in 1998 and disappeared from the top 100 less than ten years later.) In 1976, Carol Burnett staged a gentle parody of Gone with the Wind that became a seminal moment in TV history; this year, by contrast, GWTW’s only appearance in American popular culture came in the form of MAGA nostalgia: Donald Trump, at a right-wing rally, complaining “Can we get Gone with the Wind back, please?” in the middle of a rant about a Korean film, Parasite, winning the Best Picture Oscar. (Trump also cited Sunset Boulevard, a film that’s held up better, as an example of the good old days - ironic, because Sunset Boulevard is all about a character who’s corrupted and ruined by her insistence on clinging to the past.)
All of that is to say: Gone with the Wind is no longer a serious contender for Best Picture of 1939. Its time has - well, you know.
That makes 1939 a two-film race: Rules of the Game versus Wizard of Oz. Just like 1937’s Grand Illusion/Snow White battle, the Best Picture race in 1939 features a Jean Renoir masterpiece that’s universally hailed by critics and scholars as one of the greatest films ever made - and an iconic, beloved family film with a monolithic presence in American popular culture.
Having already honored Renoir, though, we’ll go with the iconic family film this time. The Wizard of Oz is one of the most beloved and popular movies of all time; it’s incomparable in terms of its influence and importance in American culture - only Star Wars comes close, I think - and it’s also widely acclaimed as a classic by critics and scholars as well.
And so: congratulations to The Wizard of Oz, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1939!
We’ll announce our nominees for 1940 in our next post, which will look back at the 1930s as a whole.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1939? Who should be a 1940 nominee? Join our community and weigh in!
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