In 1951, the nation fell in love with An American in Paris, a lighthearted romantic musical comedy featuring Gene Kelly and his buddies in a glamorous city, singing, dancing, and falling in love to the tune of classic standards of the ‘20s and ‘30s. The film was a box-office smash and won six Oscars including Best Picture - so naturally the studio rushed to make the same movie all over again, in a slightly different glamorous city with slightly different old songs. It was a retread, clearly, and it got a tepid response at first - but as time passed, the reaction grew, and now Singin’ in the Rain stands as one of the most universally beloved musicals of all time.
But is it the best film of its year? Singin’ in the Rain is a classic, but 1952 is also the age of the Western, with Gary Cooper standing tall in High Noon; it’s also the height of Japanese cinema, with masterworks by Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi; and it’s also the peak of Italian neo-realism, with another timeless entry from Vittorio De Sica (whom we last encountered in 1948’s Moonlight-winning Bicycle Thieves). So which one film from this year has best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1952, 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
Those other films are great, but it’s still Singin’ in the Rain that dominates when it comes to critical acclaim. Sight & Sound ranked Singin’ as the 20th best film of all time on its prestigious 2012 list, and the American Film Institute placed it fifth all time in 2007 - and that’s just for starters. But High Noon also gets its share of critical love as well - most notably from the AFI, which placed it among the 30 best American films ever made. Kurosawa’s Ikiru and De Sica’s Umberto D. don’t show up as often on critics’ greatest-of-all-time lists, but they did make the BBC’s 2018 ranking of the top 100 foreign-language films.
Here’s a list of 1952 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Singin' in the Rain (20)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Singin' in the Rain (T67)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Singin' in the Rain (5), High Noon (27)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Singin in the Rain (69)
Leonard Maltin: Singin' in the Rain, High Noon
National Society of Film Critics: Singin' in the Rain, High Noon
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Singin' in the Rain (26)
BBC American (2015): Singin' in the Rain (7)
BBC Foreign (2018): Ikiru (72), Umberto D (85)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Singin' in the Rain (16)
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. TSPDT’s list includes fourteen films from 1952, narrowly breaking 1951’s record:
(12) Singin' in the Rain
(119) Ikiru
(191) Umberto D.
(222) The Quiet Man
(260) The Life of Oharu
(355) Le Plaisir
(368) High Noon
(558) Limelight
(647) Casque d'Or
(668) Europa '51
(681) The Golden Coach
(736) The Bad and the Beautiful
(844) The Lusty Men
(847) Forbidden Games
No surprise, Singin’ in the Rain is tops here too, followed by Ikiru and Umberto D. High Noon is on the list too, but a bit further down, below Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi’s entry) and The Quiet Man, the rare non-Western collaboration of John Wayne and John Ford.
General Audiences
But which films from 1952 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 1952, according to IMDB (as of May 22, 2021):
Singin' in the Rain (222,989 votes)
High Noon (98,664)
Ikiru (70,510)
The Quiet Man (35,643)
Umberto D. (23,599)
Limelight (18,645)
The Bad and the Beautiful (13,685)
The Greatest Show on Earth (13,311)
Monkey Business (13,098)
Forbidden Games (11,322)
Critics and general audiences are mostly in agreement this year: Singin’ in the Rain is the runaway leader, but IMDB’s top five are all among TSPDT’s top seven. And just outside the top five are two more films that also appear on TSPDT’s list: Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight and The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli’s Kane-like fictional biopic about a Hollywood mogul who bears just a smidge of a resemblance to David O. Selznick.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1952 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.)
Singin' in the Rain (7) 142
Umberto D. (3) 117
Ikiru (2) 112
High Noon (3) 89
The Bad and the Beautiful (1) 81
The Life of Oharu (1) 68
Europa '51 (1) 58
Limelight 49
Casque d'Or 47
Forbidden Games 40
Viva Zapata 28
The Quiet Man 23
The Golden Coach 20
Moulin Rouge 8
Son of Paleface 7
It’s a pretty clear top four, with Singin’ in the Rain again the runaway leader, Umberto D. and Ikiru in a battle for second, and High Noon trailing behind in fourth. A little surprisingly, our panel had no love at all for The Quiet Man; in fact only four out of 18 panelists ranked it anywhere in their top ten. Rather, in a mild upset, it’s The Bad and the Beautiful that rounds out the top five - and by a pretty decent margin too, 13 points ahead of sixth-place Life of Oharu.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
There are four obvious locks: Singin’ in the Rain, Ikiru, Umberto D., and High Noon. Those were the top four films with our panelists, four of the top five with general audiences, four of the top seven on TSPDT’s list, and the only four films of the year that made any critical “best” list. Indisputably, those are the top four films of the year, at least according to posterity.
So what’s number five? The Quiet Man is fourth with general audiences and fourth on TSPDT’s list, but absolutely fizzled with our panel. Life of Oharu is fifth on TSPDT’s list and sixth with our panel, but a distant 15th with general audiences. That leaves two films that perform fairly well on all three metrics: Limelight and The Bad and the Beautiful. Of those, Limelight has a slight edge with TSPDT’s critics and IMDB’s general audiences - but our panelists clearly favored Bad and the Beautiful, and we’ll let them do the deciding for us.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1952 are:
THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
HIGH NOON
IKIRU
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN
UMBERTO D.
With honorable mention to The Quiet Man, which likely would have gotten that fifth spot if not for our panel. Elections matter, y’all.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
No need to draw this one out: congratulations to Singin’ in the Rain, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1952! Singin’ is the first film since 1949’s The Third Man to lead the field in all three metrics (though Sunset Boulevard came close in 1950).
The more interesting battle is for second place: Ikiru or High Noon? Ikiru leads with critics and our panelists, but High Noon has the edge with general audiences. Ikiru may have the better claim, but you could make a strong argument either way. (If we do assume Ikiru is in second, though, that makes two runner-up finishes for Kurosawa in three years after 1950’s Rashomon. He’ll have another chance in 1954 with The Seven Samurai - but that film will have Rear Window to contend with, so Kurosawa may be in for a long run of second-place finishes.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1953:
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...
ROMAN HOLIDAY
TOKYO STORY
UGETSU
THE WAGES OF FEAR
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1952? Who should win the Moonlight for 1953? Join our community and weigh in!
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