Through the first three decades of this project, we’ve found that the Oscars have rarely gotten it right when it comes to picking the best film of the year. So far, we’ve only agreed with the Academy twice: in 1934, when It Happened One Night won Best Picture, and in 1942, when Casablanca came out on top. (Even then, the Oscars didn’t actually honor Casablanca until 1943.) But the 1960s may be a different story, as several Oscar winners are still recognized today as some of the best films of their respective years: Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, The Sound of Music in 1965, and Midnight Cowboy in 1969, for instance.
One such film is 1961’s West Side Story, which still resonates with moviegoers today, sixty years after its release, and is also still recognized by critics and scholars as one of the greatest movie musicals ever made. Will it become the third Oscar winner to take home a Moonlight too?
To identify the Best Picture of 1961, 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
When picking the ‘greatest films of all time,’ film critics tend to zero in on the 1950s, 60s, and 70s - but not many 1961 flicks make the cut. West Side Story, though, is often cited as one of the greatest American films ever made - notably by the American Film Institute, in its “100 Years, 100 Movies” list of 2007, and the BBC, which also included West Side Story as one of the 100 greatest American films.
Beyond that, we only found two other 1961 films that get cited on critics’ lists: Luis Buñuel’s gleefully blasphemous Viridiana and Alain Resnais’ enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad, both of which made the top 100 in Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 survey of directors.
Here’s a list of 1961 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Viridiana (T37), Last Year at Marienbad (T91)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): West Side Story (51)
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): West Side Story (61)
BBC American (2015): West Side Story (88)
BBC Foreign (2018): Viridiana (48)
Viridiana also made the BBC’s list of the 100 greatest foreign-language films. But that’s it for 1961 - a far cry from our last two years, which saw multiple citations for numerous films.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim - and here, the year is better represented. TSPDT’s list includes seventeen films from 1961:
(66) Viridiana
(99) Last Year at Marienbad
(229) La Notte
(320) West Side Story
(338) The Innocents
(393) Accattone
(421) Yojimbo
(424) The Hustler
(464) Splendor in the Grass
(482) Lola
(504) Chronicle of a Summer
(650) Plácido
(690) Breakfast at Tiffany's
(742) The Ladies Man
(781) Il Posto
(922) The Misfits
(959) The End of Summer
TSPDT agrees with our Sight & Sound directors, putting Viridiana and Marienbad in the top 100; West Side Story trails a little ways behind. In third place, just ahead of West Side Story, is La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to 1960s L’Avventura, which earned a Moonlight nomination (though not a win) last year.
General Audiences
But which films from 1961 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 1961, according to IMDB (as of November 25, 2021):
Breakfast at Tiffany's (173,862 votes)
101 Dalmatians (161,085)
Yojimbo (118,164)
West Side Story (102,711)
The Hustler (79,756)
Judgment at Nuremberg (74,275)
The Guns of Navarone (48,623)
The Innocents (29,158)
Through a Glass Darkly (24,390)
Viridiana (23,593)
In eleventh place is Last Year at Marienbad, just behind Viridiana.
General audiences, like film critics, are lukewarm on 1961: top vote-getter Breakfast at Tiffany’s is only the 18th-most viewed film of the decade, according to IMDB. Likewise, critics and general audiences are somewhat in agreement on which films stand out as the best. There’s West Side Story again in the top five; Viridiana slips into the top ten (with Marienbad not far behind); and moviegoers also gravitate to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Yojimbo, The Hustler, and The Innocents, all of which made TSPDT’s critics’ list as well. We’re starting to see some consensus emerging.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is our number-one film of the year with IMDB voters, but the most impressive showing here is actually from third-place Yojimbo. IMDB users tend to be American, which means English-language films get more votes as a general rule - so it’s particularly noteworthy when a non-English film does well, especially when that film comes from outside Europe. Yojimbo, remarkably, is the most popular foreign-language movie of the entire decade, according to IMDB (not counting the English-dubbed films of Sergio Leone). In fact, there are only six foreign-language films prior to 1980 that score more votes: M, Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, and Stalker. Pretty good company.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 13 films from 1961 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-choice 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.)
Yojimbo (5) 151
Last Year at Marienbad (4) 131
West Side Story (4) 121
Through a Glass Darkly (1) 101
The Hustler 90
Viridiana (1) 87
La Notte (3) 86
Breakfast at Tiffany's (2) 75
Splendor in the Grass (1) 58
Judgment at Nuremberg 52
A Taste of Honey (1) 45
101 Dalmatians 43
The Innocents 38
Une Femme et Une Femme (1) 18
Divorce Italian Style (1) 17
The Misfits 13
A Raisin in the Sun 13
Accattone 12
Two Women 10
Il Posto 9
Blast of Silence 7
The Human Condition, Part III 7
Night Tide 7
El Cid 5
Leon Morin, Priest 5
The Pit and the Pendulum 5
Chronicle of a Summer 4
The Guns of Navarone 4
One, Two, Three 4
Ocean's Eleven 3
Underworld USA 3
Samson 2
We had fourteen films get write-in votes for 1960, which was a new record - but nineteen films got write-in votes this time around, including a couple with first-place votes.
Not much consensus among our panelists this time: eleven different movies got first-place votes, breaking the previous record of nine (shared by 1938, 1953, and 1957). But several films rise to the top - led by Yojimbo in first, with Marienbad and West Side Story trailing just behind. After that, there’s a tight pack of five films, with Viridiana and Breakfast at Tiffany’s bunched together with La Notte, The Hustler, and Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.
Our panelists don’t allow us to rule out too many films, but there is one exception: The Innocents does fairly well with critics and general audiences, but here it comes in dead last among our 13 shortlisted films.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Last year it was very easy to identify the top five; this year it’s a very different story. West Side Story is an obvious lock; it’s the only film that makes the top five in all of our metrics. Yojimbo is also an easy choice; it’s tops with our panel and also scores well with general audiences. Last Year at Marienbad is our third nominee: it doesn’t do as well with general audiences, but it’s a clear favorite with both critics and scholars.
Which films get the final two slots? You could make a strong claim for any of the next five films on our panel’s ranking: Through a Glass Darkly, The Hustler, Viridiana, La Notte, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The easiest ones to drop are Through a Glass Darkly, which doesn’t hit with critics, and La Notte, which fizzles with general audiences. It’s a tossup after that, but we’ll give the edge to Viridiana, which finishes first with critics, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, this year’s favorite with today’s moviegoers. The Hustler also performs well on all of our metrics, but it’ll have to settle for honorable mention here.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1961 are:
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
VIRIDIANA WEST SIDE STORY
YOJIMBO
No love for Paul Newman this time, but he’ll get several more shots in the coming years: possibly for Hud in 1963 or Cool Hand Luke in 1967, but more likely for his later collabs with Robert Redford, The Sting and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
There’s no obvious winner this year, and it’s even difficult to narrow it down to a top two or three. Viridiana takes the prize with critics, but fizzles a bit with general audiences and our panelists; Breakfast at Tiffany’s is tops with moviegoers, but not with critics or scholars; Yojimbo is first with our panel and plays well with today’s audiences, but gets lukewarm love from critics; and West Side Story and Marienbad play well across all of our metrics but don’t finish first on any of them. (Our personal favorite is Marienbad, if you’re wondering, but this isn’t about us.)
We can eliminate Viridiana and Breakfast at Tiffany’s first: both films perform very well on one metric but lag on our other two. Last Year at Marienbad is next out: it plays well with critics and scholars, but it doesn’t really take with general audiences. (Something something inscrutability.)
That leaves West Side Story and Yojimbo, both about equally deserving - and while you could make a case for either, this time we’ll give the nod to Kurosawa. Yojimbo is the clear winner with our panel, and its showing with general audiences is even more impressive. Beyond that, Yojimbo has a central place in film history: its mysterious-man-with-no-name narrative directly inspired Sergio Leone, the wildly popular Django films of the ‘60s, and God only knows how many other directors and screenwriters in the decades after that. It’s very close, but in terms of its lasting legacy, Kurosawa has the edge.
And so: congratulations to Yojimbo, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1961!
(Between 1958’s Vertigo, 1960’s Psycho, and Yojimbo this year, it’s a pretty good era for one-word “-o” titles.)
Akira Kurosawa now has four nominations and two wins, tying him for second on both counts. (Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder are our other two-time winners; Alfred Hitchcock is the runaway leader on all fronts, with 12 nominations and four wins.) In spite of that success, Kurosawa has actually had quite a run of hard luck when it comes to the Moonlights: he just missed out on nominations for 1949’s Stray Dog, 1957’s Throne of Blood, and 1958’s Hidden Fortress, and narrowly missed a win for Rashomon in 1950, so his win here makes up for some of those snubs. (And just in time too: Kurosawa has several solid entries in the 60s and 70s, but we may not see him again until Ran in 1985.)
Alain Resnais and Luis Buñuel, meanwhile, are now both 0-for-3. That might be it for Resnais, but Buñuel will have several more good chances to win; in fact he comes right back in 1962 with The Exterminating Angel. Likewise, Robert Wise is now 0-for-2 with losses for West Side Story and The Day the Earth Stood Still, but we’ll see him again in 1965 with The Sound of Music.
We started out by asking if West Side Story would be the third Oscar winner to snag a Moonlight. It came up just short, so It Happened One Night and Casablanca are still the only two double winners - but that could change very soon, because Lawrence of Arabia will have a very good shot next year. In any event, the Moonlights and the Oscars do seem to be drawing closer together this decade: our last two Oscar winners, West Side Story and The Apartment, both did well on our metrics, and My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Midnight Cowboy are still to come.
Another interesting side note: West Side Story comes close, but we’ve never had a Moonlight winner that has not come in first on at least one of our three primary metrics (They Shoot Pictures’ critical aggregate, IMDB’s user votes, or our panel of experts). Only one other film has come as close as West Side to winning a Moonlight without leading any of our metrics: 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, which came in second with critics and panelists and third with general audiences, but narrowly lost the Moonlight to Pather Panchali.
If you’re interested in keeping track: in 32 years, They Shoot Pictures’ top film of the year has won the Moonlight 20 times; IMDB’s top film has won 16 times; and our panelists’ top choice has won 23 times. Eight films have taken first on all three metrics, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a Triple Crown winner: 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain was the most recent. (The other seven? Modern Times, Bringing Up Baby, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Bicycle Thieves, and The Third Man.)
It’s usually a guarantee that a film will win the Moonlight if it leads at least two of those three metrics - but not always! City Lights, Rules of the Game, and Rear Window won two categories, but lost their respective Moonlights to M, The Wizard of Oz, and Seven Samurai. (All tough choices, but no regrets.)
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1962:
CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7
LA JETÉE
JULES ET JIM
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
1962 was a pretty good year for the French New Wave.
With Lawrence, David Lean gets his third nomination, each from a different decade (joining 1945’s Brief Encounter and 1957’s Bridge on the River Kwai). He’s just the seventh director to earn Moonlight nominations in three decades: the others are Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Luis Buñuel, Carl Theodor Dreyer, John Ford, and William Wyler. Hitch, unsurprisingly, is the only director with nominations in four decades.
With Cléo, Agnès Varda becomes just the second female director to score a Moonlight nomination, joining Maya Deren (1943’s Meshes of the Afternoon). Chris Marker’s La Jetée is also noteworthy: along with Meshes and 1956’s Night and Fog, it’s just the third short film to receive a Moonlight nod. (Is Marker the best short filmmaker ever? He also served as assistant director on Night and Fog.)
Also worth noting: 1962 is another year with a very deep bench. Among the films that miss our cut: The Manchurian Candidate, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane, Lolita, Vivre Sa Vie, and The Exterminating Angel. (So Buñuel won’t get his fourth nomination right away after all - but Belle de Jour isn’t too far off.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1961? Who should win the Moonlight for 1962? Join our community and weigh in!
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