Every year we’ve covered so far, it hasn’t been easy to choose a single “best” picture - but it has been easy to narrow it down to a clear top two. For 1930, your top two films are The Blue Angel and All Quiet on the Western Front. For 1931, City Lights and M. Trouble in Paradise edges out Scarface in 1932; Duck Soup narrowly beats King Kong in 1933; and in our most recent installment, it came down to It Happened One Night and L’Atalante. You can make a strong case for either film as being the “best” of that year - but it’s definitely one of those two.
For 1935, though - as we’ll see - it’s a very different story.
To identify the Best Picture of 1935, 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 four 1935 films that get cited in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and none of them stand out. The American Film Institute included the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera on its 2007 top-100 list; Entertainment Weekly’s critics went with the Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat. In their best-of-the-century list, the National Society of Film Critics also included Top Hat as well as Bride of Frankenstein. And Leonard Maltin’s best-of-the-century list included Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps along with Night at the Opera and Bride of Frankenstein.
Here’s a list of 1935 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): A Night at the Opera (85)
Leonard Maltin: A Night at the Opera, Bride of Frankenstein, The 39 Steps
National Society of Film Critics: Bride of Frankenstein, Top Hat
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Top Hat (60)
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 five films from 1935 - the four mentioned above, plus one more that might have been just a little too infamous for the other critics:
(313) Bride of Frankenstein
(483) Triumph of the Will
(509) A Night at the Opera
(518) Top Hat
(597) The 39 Steps
General Audiences
Four films stand out on critics’ lists, and Triumph of the Will still gets acclaim despite its status as Nazi propaganda. But which 1935 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 1935, according to IMDB (as of May 2, 2020):
The 39 Steps (49,287 votes)
Bride of Frankenstein (41,344)
A Night at the Opera (29,580)
Mutiny on the Bounty (19,921)
Top Hat (16,528)
Triumph of the Will (14,395)
Captain Blood (12,377)
The Informer (5,399)
A Tale of Two Cities (4,929)
Anna Karenina (4,768)
There’s pretty clear agreement between critics and general audiences: the six most popular movies of the year are our critics’ top five plus that year’s Oscar winner, Mutiny on the Bounty.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 10 films from 1935 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.)
A Night at the Opera (2) 147
The 39 Steps (7) 136
Bride of Frankenstein (2) 128
Top Hat (3) 118
Triumph of the Will (3) 97
Mutiny on the Bounty (2) 78
The Informer (1) 71
Captain Blood 51
Alice Adams 48
A Tale of Two Cities 45
Toni 9
Ruggles of Red Gap 8
Becky Sharp 7
An Inn in Tokyo 7
G-Men 6
New Women 6
Wife! Be Like a Rose 6
Anna Karenina 5
Man on the Flying Trapeze 3
Devdas 2
Mad Love 2
The Little Colonel 1
Once again, there’s general agreement: The 39 Steps, A Night at the Opera, Bride of Frankenstein, Top Hat, and (begrudgingly) Triumph of the Will are our scholars’ top five, with Mutiny on the Bounty a clear but distant sixth. John Ford’s Oscar-winning The Informer also gets some love, but not as much.
An interesting trend among our scholars: they all love the Marx Brothers, but few are willing to rank their films as the best of the year. In 1933, Duck Soup came first in points even though King Kong got far more first-place votes - and the same thing happens again this year, with 39 Steps getting lots of first-place votes but Night at the Opera coming first in overall points. The Marxes get nine second- or third-place votes; Hitchcock only gets four. Ranked voting matters!
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
This year, it’s very easy to identify the top five. If we wanted to, we could swap out the odious Triumph of the Will for the still-celebrated Mutiny on the Bounty, but we’ll stick with our scholars and give the nod to Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl thus becomes the first female director to earn a Moonlight nomination, and Triumph becomes our first nominated documentary. (Though both those milestones are mostly owing to the fact that we began this project with 1930.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1935 are:
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
THE 39 STEPS
TOP HAT
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s a much more wide-open race this year: certainly no clear winner, and not even a clear top two. We can quickly rule out Triumph of the Will, but that still leaves four films with a strong claim for being the “best.”
Of those four, we can eliminate Top Hat first: Astaire and Rogers get some love from critics, but it’s (easily) the least-viewed of the four films and it also (narrowly) comes in fourth among our scholars.
That leaves A Night at the Opera, The 39 Steps, and Bride of Frankenstein. A Night at the Opera comes in first among our scholars - but we just honored the Marx Brothers two years ago for Duck Soup, so we can let them out this year. We can eliminate 39 Steps for a similar reason: it’s IMDB’s most-viewed movie and it gets the most first-place votes among our scholars, but we know we’ll have many more chances to honor Hitchcock down the road.
That leaves Bride of Frankenstein. A worthy winner? Absolutely: it’s a close second on IMDB, a close third among our scholars, and number one with They Shoot Pictures, which ranks it as the most-acclaimed movie of the year. It’s got one of the most indelible acting performances of the decade in Karloff’s monster. And in a decade that was awfully short on humanism, it’s also one of the most humanistic pictures of the era - either in spite of its status as a monster flick, or because of it. (This also gives us the chance to honor the great James Whale. So far our Moonlight-winning directors have been Whale, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg - a pretty good list.)
And so: congratulations to Bride of Frankenstein, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1935!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1936:
FURY
MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN
MODERN TIMES
SABOTAGE SWING TIME
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1935? Who should win the Moonlight for 1936? Join our community and weigh in!
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