When it comes to the Oscars, the year 1942 is unique in cinema history: Mrs. Miniver won Best Picture for that year, but 1943’s Best Picture winner was also a 1942 film, Casablanca, that got pushed back a year for awards consideration. So far we’ve only agreed with the Oscars once - in 1934, for It Happened One Night - but this time we’ve got double the odds.
To identify the Best Picture of 1942, 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
Casablanca is an all-timer, of course, so it’s frequently recognized by critics as one of the best films ever. But Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons also gets some love, despite its infamously hacky editing: the BBC ranked it as the eleventh-greatest American film ever made, and it actually checked in ahead of Casablanca on Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 survey. The patriotic George Cohan biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy snuck onto the AFI’s top-100 list in 2007; meanwhile Preston Sturges continued his run of success with The Palm Beach Story, which got recognized by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 best films of the 20th century. And then there’s Bambi, the last of the ‘big five’ early Disney films: Bambi doesn’t get too much love on critics’ lists, but Entertainment Weekly in 2013 named it as one of the top 15 films of all time.
Here’s a list of 1942 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): The Magnificent Ambersons (T81), Casablanca (T84)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Casablanca (3), Yankee Doodle Dandy (98)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Casablanca (28)
Leonard Maltin: Casablanca
National Society of Film Critics: Casablanca, The Palm Beach Story
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Casablanca (6)
BBC American (2015): Casablanca (9), The Magnificent Ambersons (11)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Casablanca (3), Bambi (14)
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 seven films from 1942:
(36) Casablanca (77) The Magnificent Ambersons
(102) To Be Or Not To Be
(345) Listen to Britain
(376) The Palm Beach Story
(448) Cat People
(614) Bambi
Here too, we see Casablanca on top, followed closely by The Magnificent Ambersons, but TSPDT’s list also has high regard for Ernst Lubitsch’s wartime black comedy To Be Or Not To Be.
General Audiences
But which films from 1942 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 1942, according to IMDB (as of September 4, 2020):
Casablanca (510,034 votes)
Bambi (128,270)
To Be Or Not To Be (27,504)
Saboteur (22,703)
The Magnificent Ambersons (21,896)
The Ox-Bow Incident (20,445)
Cat People (19,259)
Mrs. Miniver (15,463)
Now, Voyager (14,812)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (13,863)
Casablanca is far and away the most-watched film, not only of 1942, but of the entire decade. (Citizen Kane and It’s A Wonderful Life are essentially tied for second, each more than 100,000 votes behind.) The only other 1942 film that’s still frequently watched is Bambi; if you’re wondering, IMDB ranks Bambi as the most-watched Disney film of the decade, slightly ahead of Pinocchio.
(Side note: different sources classify The Ox-Bow Incident as either 1942 or 1943, and for our purposes we’re counting it as a 1943 film. If you removed it from IMDB’s list here, the new number 10 from 1942 would be Holiday Inn.)
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 12 films from 1942 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.)
Casablanca (5) 147
The Magnificent Ambersons (5) 128
Cat People (2) 98
Now, Voyager (3) 95
To Be Or Not To Be (2) 91
The Palm Beach Story 88
Bambi (1) 55
Saboteur 53
Woman of the Year 39
Yankee Doodle Dandy 32
Mrs. Miniver 23
Pride of the Yankees 17
The Battle of Midway 8
The Murderer Lives at No. 21 8
Listen to Britain 6
The Devil’s Envoys 3
Les Visiteurs du Soir 2
Casablanca and The Magnificent Ambersons each get five first-place votes, though Casablanca comes out ahead on points. Film critics and general audiences vastly prefer Casablanca, but our panel has the race much closer. (Our other 1942 Oscar winner, Mrs. Miniver, doesn’t do so well.)
One pleasant surprise with our panel is the popularity of Jacques Tourneur’s horror classic Cat People - which also came in seventh with IMDB voters and sixth in TSPDT’s ranking. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Cat People has all the trappings of a beloved B-horror masterpiece, and it was also highly influential: among other things, Tourneur invented the jump scare here. (The scene in question involved a bus, and filmmakers for years afterward referred to jump scares as “buses.”)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Casablanca and The Magnificent Ambersons are locks. So is To Be Or Not To Be, which is third with critics and general audiences and a close fifth with our panel. We’ll also give a nod to Cat People, which does well with critics and general audiences in addition to being loved by our panelists. (We also really like that movie ourselves, and we’re grateful to the panelists for singling it out: neither of us had seen Cat People before getting the panel votes. That mistake has since been corrected.)
This year, the fifth and final spot is wide open. Now, Voyager and The Palm Beach Story each did well with our panel, and Palm Beach also makes TSPDT’s top-1000 list, but neither film has much support among present-day audiences. Bambi, meanwhile, also makes TSPDT’s list and does extremely well among general audiences, but fizzled a bit with our panel (minus the one voter who placed it first). Any one of the three could get the nomination, but we’ll side with audiences this time and give it to Bambi - now the fourth Disney film to get a Moonlight nod (along with Snow White, Fantasia, and Dumbo), though probably the last Disney nominee for a while.
The only one of Disney’s early big five not to get a nomination was 1940’s Pinocchio - which, ironically, happens to be my favorite of the lot. 1940 was a busy year for films.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1942 are:
BAMBI
CASABLANCA
CAT PEOPLE
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
TO BE OR NOT TO BE
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This is another easy year, as it turns out. Our panel vote turned out to be fairly close, and Ambersons is indeed a bona fide classic, but let’s be honest: when you close your eyes and imagine a “film that stands the test of time,” it’s probably some scene from Casablanca you’re thinking of.
And so: congratulations to Casablanca, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1942! (Casablanca joins It Happened One Night as just the second film to win both the Oscar and the Moonlight. There was no Oscar winner from 1943 because Casablanca hogged the trophy that year, so it’ll be at least two years before we get our third.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1943:
DAY OF WRATH
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
OSSESSIONE
SHADOW OF A DOUBT
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1942? Who should win the Moonlight for 1943? Join our community and weigh in!
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