So far in our journey through film history, we’ve nominated quite a few “genre” films, but not many have won. 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein is our only winner from the horror or sci-fi genres, and we still haven’t had a Western take the prize. But that may be about to change, because nearly all the top films of 1956 are genre classics: this one year brings us three films that movie lovers frequently describe as the greatest Western, the greatest documentary, and the greatest B sci-fi/horror flick ever made. But which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1956, 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 it comes to 1956, there’s one film that shows up most often on critics’ lists of the greatest movies ever made: John Ford’s The Searchers. Ford’s complex Homeric odyssey about a decade-long search for a kidnapped girl, with John Wayne’s Ahabic antihero leading the way, is not only one of the most influential films of all time; it’s also consistently rated as one of the best. Most notably, it made the top ten in Sight & Sound’s influential critics’ survey; it’s also high on the AFI’s and the BBC’s respective rankings of the greatest films ever to come out of America.
Not to be outdone, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped also made Sight & Sound’s top 100, not far behind The Searchers; in fact Bresson topped Ford in a simultaneous poll of directors.
Here’s a list of 1956 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): The Searchers (7), A Man Escaped (T69)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): A Man Escaped (T37), The Searchers (T48)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): The Searchers (12)
Leonard Maltin: The Searchers
National Society of Film Critics: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Aparajito, The Searchers, Written on the Wind
BBC American (2015): The Searchers (5)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): The Searchers (12)
The Searchers dominates here, with a couple noteworthy mentions for A Man Escaped, but the National Society of Film Critics also cite three other films: our B horror classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Aparajito, Satyajit Ray’s followup to last year’s Moonlight winner, Pather Panchali; and Douglas Sirk’s satiric(?) melodrama Written on the Wind. The NSFC loved 1956.
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 twelve films from 1956:
(9) The Searchers
(92) A Man Escaped
(187) Night and Fog
(381) Written on the Wind
(603) The Killing
(604) Bigger than Life
(616) Aparajito
(632) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(800) The Red Balloon
(848) Street of Shame
(908) Forbidden Planet
(956) The Ten Commandments
There’s The Searchers at the top once again, followed by A Man Escaped in the top 100; just behind them is Alain Resnais’ acclaimed Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. (TSPDT classifies Night and Fog as a 1955 film, but most sources put it in 1956.) Behind those three are a few other films we’ve already encountered: Written on the Wind, Aparajito, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Not to mention another classic B flick, Forbidden Planet, a little further back.)
General Audiences
But which films from 1956 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 1956, according to IMDB (as of July 5, 2021):
The Killing (83,556 votes)
The Searchers (82,388)
The Ten Commandments (66,056)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (60,315)
Forbidden Planet (46,164)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (45,970)
Giant (35,015)
The Wrong Man (26,459)
Around the World in 80 Days (25,463)
The King and I (24,252)
Just outside the top ten are A Man Escaped and Night and Fog, in eleventh and thirteenth place respectively.
Present-day moviegoers don’t love 1956: not a single film from this year gets 100,000 votes, for the first time since 1947. (In fact there’s only one other more recent year, 1970, where that’s the case.) Topping the list, edging out The Searchers, is The Killing, Stanley Kubrick’s first significant feature - but even that film is far less popular than any of the films Kubrick would make later. There are a few directors whose films get seen in part just because they made them, and Kubrick’s one. (Alfred Hitchcock is another, and he also makes this year’s top ten with two of his lesser films, The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man.)
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1956 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.)
The Searchers (2) 120
Night and Fog (5) 110
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1) 86
Written on the Wind (1) 84
A Man Escaped (5) 78
Arapajito 55
The Man Who Knew Too Much 51
Bob le Flambeur (1) 47
The Killing 43
The Burmese Harp (2) 32
Around the World in 80 Days (1) 31
Forbidden Planet 31
The Red Balloon 30
The Ten Commandments 29
Giant 27
Bigger Than Life 17
The King and I 14
The Girl Can't Help It 9
There's Always Tomorrow 3
There’s a clear top five, with The Searchers and Night and Fog in a close battle for first and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Written on the Wind, and A Man Escaped not too far behind - and then a huge gap between A Man Escaped in fifth place and Arapajito in sixth. The first-place votes are split across eight different films, but Night and Fog and A Man Escaped combine for most of them; The Searchers doesn’t get many first-place votes, but it gets enough second-place votes (six) to come out on top. (Significantly, The Killing trails way behind in ninth.)
Strangely, in a year that features both Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet, A Man Escaped might be the biggest cult classic of them all: five of our panelists ranked it as their number-one movie, but only five other panelists even placed it in their top ten. You either love it or you don’t.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Our panelists make it easy for us this year. The Searchers is number one or number two on all of our metrics, so it’s the most obvious lock. A Man Escaped and Night and Fog don’t perform quite as well with moviegoers, but they’re clearly the favorites with critics and scholars, so those are our next two nominees. Invasion of the Body Snatchers does perform well across all our metrics, so that’s nomination number four.
That leaves one more spot, and we’ll go with our panelists and give it to Written on the Wind. You can also make a strong case for The Killing, but I suspect we’ll have more chances to recognize Stanley Kubrick in the future. By contrast, this might be Douglas Sirk's best shot for a nomination: he'll also have a good chance for Imitation of Life in 1959, but it's a pretty crowded field that year.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1956 are:
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS A MAN ESCAPED NIGHT AND FOG THE SEARCHERS WRITTEN ON THE WIND
With apologies to Kubrick. We’ll see him again real soon.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
This time it’s easy. Written on the Wind fizzles with general audiences (it’s only 21st on IMDB), and so do A Man Escaped and Night and Fog to a lesser extent. Invasion of the Body Snatchers performs pretty well on all our metrics; it might be our runner-up.
But it’s The Searchers that rises to the top, every way you look at it. It narrowly wins our panel vote, it’s second only to The Killing with general audiences, and it’s far and away the most celebrated film of the year with critics - in fact it’s one of the most celebrated films of any year.
And so: congratulations to The Searchers, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1956! After near-misses from Stagecoach and High Noon, The Searchers is our first Western to win a Moonlight - and it’s also the first Moonlight winner from the U.S. since 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. John Ford wins on his third nomination, but he had to wait a long time for it: his other two nominations were all the way back in 1939 and 1940, for Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1957:
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA
PATHS OF GLORY
THE SEVENTH SEAL
TWELVE ANGRY MEN
As it turns out, Stanley Kubrick only has to wait a year to get his first nomination. 1957 also brings us an extremely tight race between eight iconic films, so we’ll have quite a bit to say about a few movies that didn’t make the cut as well.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1956? Who should win the Moonlight for 1957? Join our community and weigh in!
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