We’ve journeyed through four years of film history, and thus far we haven’t agreed with the Oscars yet. But in 1934, the Academy recognized a movie that’s since gone down as a bona fide all-time classic.
“It Happened One Night” is great - but was it really the best picture of 1934?
In order to answer that question, 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
It Happened One Night frequently appears on critics’ lists of the “best” films of all-time, but it’s not the only 1934 movie that does. There’s also Jean Vigo’s poetic and beautiful L’Atalante, which ranks extremely high among critics, notably in Sight & Sound’s prestigious decennial ranking. Leonard Maltin included W.C. Fields’ It’s A Gift on his list of the best movies of the 20th century, but otherwise the year is dominated by L’Atalante and It Happened One Night.
Here’s a list of 1934 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound (critics): L’Atalante (12)
Sight & Sound (directors): L’Atalante (T22)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): It Happened One Night (46)
Leonard Maltin: It Happened One Night, It’s A Gift
National Society of Film Critics: L’Atalante
BBC Foreign (2018): L’Atalante (50)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): It Happened One Night (48)
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 six films from 1934:
(18) L’Atalante
(332) It Happened One Night
(417) The Scarlet Empress
(422) Man of Aran
(783) The Goddess
(832) It’s A Gift
General Audiences
L’Atalante and It Happened One Night are the clear favorites among critics. But which 1934 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 1934, according to IMDB (as of April 19, 2020):
It Happened One Night (89,024 votes)
The Thin Man (25,234)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (16,073)
L’Atalante (13,718)
The Black Cat (8,854)
The Gay Divorcee (6,562)
Of Human Bondage (5,887)
March of the Wooden Soldiers (5,813)
Twentieth Century (5,527)
The Scarlet Empress (5,476)
It Happened One Night is the runaway winner here, with The Thin Man - another famous comic-bantering couple - in second. (It’s A Gift falls just outside the top 10 - as does another film we’ll hear from later, Imitation of Life.)
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 11 films from 1934 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.)
It Happened One Night (6) 153
L’Atalante (7) 139
Imitation of Life (1) 117
The Thin Man 100
The Scarlet Empress (1) 91
The Man Who Knew Too Much (3) 90
The Gay Divorcee 82
The Black Cat 49
Twentieth Century 40
It’s A Gift (1) 23
The Scarlet Pimpernel 19
Man of Aran 13
The Seahorse (1) 10
The Goddess 10
Maniac 5
Floating Weeds 4
The Merry Widow 4
The Woman of the Port 3
It Happened One Night and L’Atalante are the clear winners among our scholars and get most of the first-place votes. The racial melodrama Imitation of Life is a surprising third, though, with The Thin Man close behind. Alfred Hitchcock’s early classic The Man Who Knew Too Much gets three first-place votes but finishes sixth overall. And while one of our scholars agrees with Leonard Maltin on the greatness of It’s A Gift, W.C. Fields doesn’t fare as well among our overall panel.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
L’Atalante and It Happened One Night are locks. So is The Thin Man, which is second among general audiences and fourth among our scholars. It comes down to three films for the final two spots; we’ll have plenty of time to recognize Hitchcock later, so we’ll snub him this year (sorry!) and give our last two nominations to Imitation of Life and The Scarlet Empress.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1933 are:
L’ATALANTE
IMITATION OF LIFE
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
THE SCARLET EMPRESS THE THIN MAN
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Once again, it’s a two-way race, and you can’t go wrong with either L’Atalante or It Happened One Night. Jean Vigo gets the nod with critics, but Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert win with general audiences.
So which film wins with our panel of scholars? It Happened One Night leads in points, but L’Atalante has slightly more first-place votes, 7 to 6. How about the seven voters who gave their first-place votes to a different movie? Two of them preferred L’Atalante, but the other five preferred It Happened One Night - giving Clark and Claudette an 11-9 edge overall.
It’s extremely close - but this year, we’ll agree with the Oscars. And so: congratulations to “It Happened One Night,” the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1934!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1935:
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
THE 39 STEPS
TOP HAT
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1934? Who should win the Moonlight for 1935? (Trust us, it won’t be Triumph of the Will.) Join our community and weigh in!
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