Okay, so where were we?
It’s been a few months since we last posted (thanks, 2020!), but we’re finally back! And still in the mid-1940s, which means everything is colored by the presence of World War II. That manifests itself not only in the content of the films - patriotic propaganda mixed with pessimistic noir - but also in the filmmaking process, not to mention film geography. It’s around here that Hollywood establishes its dominance over Europe in the movie industry, since Europe is devastated but California emerges mostly unscathed. But Europe is still producing some pretty great films nonetheless - including two 1945 classics, filmed under the radar, with borrowed equipment and a refugee cast and crew, amidst the tumult and rubble of war, that took more than a few minor miracles even to get made.
To identify the Best Picture of 1945, 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
The two “minor miracle” films I’m referring to are Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise and Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist masterpiece Rome, Open City, and those are the two 1945 films that show up most frequently on critics’ lists of the best films of all time. Children of Paradise, most notably, has occasionally been cited as the greatest film ever made in any year - a pretty impressive feat for a three-hour romantic drama about the rise of French mime, even before you consider the circumstances surrounding its making. Rome, Open City also wins acclaim as a foundational work of Italian neorealism - not to mention a harrowing yet inspirational story of anti-fascist resistance fighters (clearly paving the way for later films like Army of Shadows and Battle of Algiers), led by a stunning performance from Aldo Fabrizi, who’d hitherto mostly been known for wacky comedies.
Here’s a list of 1945 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Children of Paradise (T73)
National Society of Film Critics: Children of Paradise, Rome Open City
BBC Foreign (2018): Children of Paradise (46)
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 1945:
(62) Children of Paradise
(131) Rome, Open City
(149) Brief Encounter
(402) I Know Where I'm Going!
(623) Detour
(721) Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
(946) They Were Expendable
(957) Mildred Pierce
Once again, Children of Paradise and Rome, Open City are the clear leaders - but they’re joined by Noel Coward and David Lean’s two-ships-passing-in-the-night romantic drama Brief Encounter, frequently cited as one of the greatest British films ever made.
General Audiences
But which films from 1945 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 1945, according to IMDB (as of February 7, 2020):
Spellbound (43,539 votes)
Brief Encounter (35,646)
The Lost Weekend (33,576)
Rome, Open City (23,528)
Mildred Pierce (22,813)
Children of Paradise (18,250)
Detour (15,266)
Scarlet Street (14,636)
And Then There Were None (13,110)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (11,923)
There’s no film from 1945 that gets much love from general audiences anymore. There are enough Hitchcock fans to make Spellbound the top vote-getter, but Spellbound is hardly beloved: it’s only the seventeenth-most viewed Hitchcock film, according to IMDB, in between Marnie and Frenzy. Just behind Spellbound, though, are a few films we’ve already encountered: Brief Encounter, Rome, Open City, and Children of Paradise are all in the top six, and we also see Mildred Pierce and Detour, which both show up in They Shoot Pictures’ top 1000 as well.
And there’s one more great film on the list that’s equally worthy of consideration: The Lost Weekend, Oscar’s 1945 Best Picture winner, which also earned director Billy Wilder the Academy Award he probably should have won for Double Indemnity the year before. (Not that we don’t love Leo McCarey.)
So we now have about seven films in the mix: Children of Paradise, Rome, Open City, and Brief Encounter for sure, with Mildred Pierce and Detour also getting acclaim from general audiences and critics alike, and Spellbound and Lost Weekend still in the running. (And we’re keeping our eyes on I Know Where I’m Going, Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and They Were Expendable too.)
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1945 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.)
Rome, Open City (6) 125
Mildred Pierce (1) 112
Children of Paradise (6) 106
Brief Encounter (1) 81
Detour (1) 78
Spellbound (1) 61
The Lost Weekend 56
Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1) 54
Battle of San Pietro 38
I Know Where I'm Going 33
Dead of Night 24
And Then There Were None 16
The Picture of Dorian Gray 16
Leave Her To Heaven (1) 10
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 9
Scarlet Street 9
They Were Expendable 8
Fallen Angel 5
My Name Is Julia Ross 3
Dames du Bois de Boulogne gets some love (and one first-place vote), but our top seven are still our top seven, with Children of Paradise and Rome, Open City dominating the first-place votes and Mildred Pierce putting up a surprisingly strong showing in second place. (The Joan Crawford melodrama only got one first-place vote, but six other panelists ranked Mildred in their top three.) Brief Encounter trails just behind in fourth, with Detour, Spellbound, and Lost Weekend a bit further back.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There are clearly seven legitimate contenders this year, and four of them are locks. We could have chiseled in Children of Paradise and Rome, Open City from the get-go; those two were never in doubt. Brief Encounter is a lock as well, ranking in the top four with critics, general audiences, and our panelists alike. We weren’t as sure about Mildred Pierce - but our panelists certainly were, so Joan Crawford gets a nomination too.
That leaves one more spot and three worthy options: Detour, Spellbound, and The Lost Weekend. We can easily eliminate Lost Weekend, which trails Spellbound in each of our metrics, but then it’s a tossup: do we go with Hitchcock, the top vote-getter of the year with general audiences, or Edgar Ulmer’s gritty noir, which wins out with both critics and our panel of scholars? Two metrics beat one - and anyway, we’ll have plenty more chances to talk about Hitchcock - so we’ll side with our panelists and give the nod to Detour. (As it happens, one of our panelists, Noah Isenberg, literally wrote the book on that film - though interestingly, he’s not the one who gave Detour his first-place vote.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1945 are:
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
CHILDREN OF PARADISE
DETOUR
MILDRED PIERCE
ROME, OPEN CITY
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Brief Encounter is a classic and Mildred Pierce got a lot of love from our panel, but it’s a clear two-way race this year between the “minor miracles,” Children of Paradise and Rome, Open City.
How does one decide? Both films are remarkable, engaging as well as important; they’re both cited as among the best films of all time; and they get about the same level of support from critics, general audiences, and our panelists. (Critics narrowly prefer Paradise; general audiences give the slight nod to Open City; and the two films got the same number of first-place votes with our panel, though Open City came out slightly ahead on points.)
We’d love to call it a tie and be done with it - but no, that would be cheating. In the end, we went with the film that made the Sight & Sound critics’ list and the one that’s most frequently been named the greatest ever made - but ask us again on another day, and our answer might be different.
And so: congratulations to Children of Paradise, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1945! (With deep apologies to Rome, Open City. This was the hardest choice we’ve had to make so far.)
No time to dwell, though! Here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1946:
LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
THE BIG SLEEP
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
NOTORIOUS
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1945? Who should win the Moonlight for 1946? Join our community and weigh in!
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