The year 1946 was the first full year of the post-war era, and Hollywood must have been ready for it, because they cranked out several of the decade’s best movies all in a row. Bogey and Bacall reunited for another classic, Frank Capra returned with arguably the greatest Christmas film ever made - and since we were still grappling with the aftereffects of the war, 1946 also saw memorable films about returning veterans and ongoing Nazi machinations. But which one film from 1946 best stood the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1946, 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 Sight & Sound conducted the latest edition of its prestigious once-a-decade survey, critics placed one 1946 film in their all-time top 100: Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life & Death. But that’s an outlier, as it turns out: Matter is a great film, but it doesn’t generally show up on critics’ lists of the all-time best.
However, there are three 1946 films that do routinely get mentioned, albeit not by Sight & Sound: It’s A Wonderful Life, Notorious, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Wonderful Life, Capra’s beloved holiday classic, is the most-often cited, making the all-time top 20 in surveys conducted by the American Film Institute, The Hollywood Reporter, and Entertainment Weekly. General audiences love it too: in a 2014 Harris survey of American moviegoers, It’s A Wonderful Life was the ninth-most mentioned as their favorite film. The Best Years of Our Lives, that year’s Oscar-winner, also holds up well, most notably coming in fifteenth in the BBC’s 2015 ranking of the greatest American films ever made. Alfred Hitchock’s Notorious also makes that list, as well as Entertainment Weekly’s; of all Hitch’s films from that decade, Notorious is the one that shows up most often on critics’ lists of the best movies ever made.
Here’s a list of 1946 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): A Matter of Life & Death (T90)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): It’s A Wonderful Life (20), Best Years of Our Lives (37)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): It’s A Wonderful Life (51)
Leonard Maltin: My Darling Clementine, It’s A Wonderful Life, Best Years of Our Lives, Great
Expectations
Harris poll (2014): It’s A Wonderful Life (9)
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): It’s A Wonderful Life (20)
BBC American (2015): Best Years of Our Lives (15), It’s A Wonderful Life (46), Notorious (68)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): It’s A Wonderful Life (6), Notorious (23), Best Years of Our Lives (64)
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 twelve films from 1946, more than any other year to date:
(83) It's A Wonderful Life
(132) My Darling Clementine
(139) Notorious
(154) A Matter of Life & Death
(199) Paisan
(220) Ivan the Terrible II
(224) The Best Years of Our Lives
(269) La Belle et la Bête
(302) The Big Sleep
(677) Great Expectations
(878) Duel in the Sun
(950) Gilda
Again, It’s A Wonderful Life comes out on top, and Notorious and Best Years get high acclaim - but there are quite a few high-ranking 1946 films, including John Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Paisan, Roberto Rossellini’s follow-up to last year’s Rome, Open City.
General Audiences
But which films from 1946 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 1946, according to IMDB (as of February 21, 2020):
It's A Wonderful Life (407,334 votes)
Notorious (92,557)
The Big Sleep (78,977)
The Best Years of Our Lives (57,449)
Gilda (28,083)
La Belle et la Bête (24,283)
The Stranger (24,202)
Great Expectations (22,157)
My Darling Clementine (21,597)
A Matter of Life & Death (19,629)
Wonderful Life is the runaway winner here, thanks to its status as a holiday tradition. (In fact it’s the second-most viewed film of the entire decade, according to IMDB, behind only Casablanca.) General audiences and critics agree on Notorious and Best Years too - and moviegoers also love Bogey and Bacall’s The Big Sleep, which ranked fairly high on TSPDT’s list as well. In fact there’s remarkable agreement between general audiences and critics on the best films of 1946: nine of the ten most-viewed films of the year also show up on TSPDT’s top-1000 list, and every 1946 film that gets cited in critics’ all-time “best” lists also makes IMDB’s top ten.
So we’ve got nine films that seem to be emerging from the pack: Wonderful Life, Notorious, and Best Years in the lead, followed in some order by The Big Sleep, Gilda, Belle et la Bête, Great Expectations, My Darling Clementine, and Sight & Sound’s favorite, A Matter of Life & Death. Our five nominees will probably come from this list of nine.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1946 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.)
Notorious (4) 117
The Best Years of Our Lives (8) 111
The Big Sleep 85
It's A Wonderful Life (1) 80
Belle et la Bête 78
Gilda 60
Paisan (3) 59
A Matter of Life & Death (1) 52
The Killers 43
My Darling Clementine 42
Great Expectations 30
Shoeshine 28
The Postman Always Rings Twice 25
The Spiral Staircase 12
Duel in the Sun 3
Let There Be Light 3
Our expert panel has the same top four as IMDB voters, with The Big Sleep joining Notorious, Best Years, and Wonderful Life.
The biggest surprise here is a lowly fourth-place showing for It’s A Wonderful Life, which ranks first by a wide margin on every other metric. Our experts preferred Notorious and Best Years of Our Lives, though Best Years turned out to be strangely divisive: eight of our 17 panelists ranked it first, but four of the other nine voters didn’t even place it in their top 10. (The same was true of Paisan, to a lesser degree: it got three first-place votes, but half of our panelists left it off their lists altogether.) Notorious, on the other hand, had more universal appeal, with six second-place votes to go along with its four first-place votes.
Further down on the list, we see Jean Cocteau’s poetic masterpiece Belle et la Bête emerging as the clear fifth-place favorite among our panelists. That’s also in line with general audiences: Belle is sixth with IMDB voters, just behind Gilda - which, as it happens, ranked sixth with our experts. There’s a lot of talky talk about how critics and scholars don’t appreciate the same films that ordinary moviegoers do, and vice versa - but here, the degree of agreement is pretty striking. (Nor is 1946 an exception: we’ve seen this pretty consistently from year to year. Sooner or later, critics and general audiences do tend to converge.)
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Earlier I singled out nine films that were clearly ahead of the pack; now we can divide those nine into three distinct tiers. The top tier includes four films: It’s A Wonderful Life, Notorious, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Big Sleep. These were the top four with our expert panel as well as general audiences, and (not counting Big Sleep) these are also the films that get cited most often on critics’ all-time “best” lists. All four are locks.
Tier three, on the bottom, includes Matter of Life & Death, My Darling Clementine, and Great Expectations. All three are great - and Matter and Clementine both fare well with critics - but our panelists and general audiences alike rank them well outside the top five. We can eliminate them as contenders. (But don’t shed too many tears for their directors: Powell & Pressburger, John Ford, and David Lean currently have four Moonlight nominations and zero wins between them, but we’ll encounter all of them again in the future.)
That leaves one spot left and two legitimate candidates. Belle et la Bête is sixth with general audiences and a clear fifth with our experts - just two points behind Wonderful Life, in fact - and it’s also in TSPDT’s all-time top 300. Gilda, meanwhile, is fifth with general audiences and sixth with our experts, and it also sneaks onto TSPDT’s top 1000, albeit well behind Belle. Gilda would be a worthy nominee, but we’ll go with our experts and give the final nod to Cocteau. (That means Gilda’s director, Charles Vidor, will likely get shut out when it comes to Moonlight nominations - but the same probably won’t be said for Gilda’s star, Rita Hayworth.)
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1946 are:
LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
THE BIG SLEEP
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
NOTORIOUS
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
You’d think It’s A Wonderful Life would be the runaway winner this year, but its poor showing with our expert panel makes this a tougher decision. We can definitely eliminate Belle et la Bête, though; great as it is, it was definitely the fifth of our five nominees - and while our experts weren’t sold on Capra this year, they still placed him ahead of Cocteau.
That leaves the four films in our top tier, and we can probably eliminate The Big Sleep next: Bogey and Bacall are third with both IMDB voters and our panelists, but they trail the other three contenders pretty distantly with critics.
So three movies remain: It’s A Wonderful Life, popular and beloved; Notorious, arguably Hitchcock’s best film of the 40s; and Best Years of Our Lives, the rare Oscar winner that actually still holds up just as well sixty years later. Notorious is definitely the least-cited of the three on critics’ “best” lists, but it’s second with TSPDT, second with general audiences, and first with our expert panel. Best Years has the slight edge with critics’ “best” lists and definitely gets more first-place votes from our experts - but it trails Notorious on every other metric, so we can reluctantly eliminate it too. (This likely means the great William Wyler will never win a Moonlight, though we may have more to say about that when Roman Holiday and Ben-Hur come along. For now, though, he’s one of eight directors with two nominations and no wins. So far, nobody is 0-for-3 - though Hitchcock didn’t win until his fifth nomination, and the Disney studio is 0-for-4 if you combine all their films together.)
In the end, though, we have to come back to Capra: George Bailey may not have warmed the cockles of our panelists’ hearts, but It’s A Wonderful Life is the landslide winner on every other front. We can debate which 1946 film is the best, but Wonderful Life is certainly the most beloved, the most remembered, and the most culturally influential - and it’s also in that “best” conversation too, wherever you happen to stand.
And so: congratulations to It’s A Wonderful Life, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1946! Frank Capra also won for 1934’s It Happened One Night, so he now joins Charlie Chaplin as a multiple Moonlight winner. (And apologies to Hitchcock for yet another near miss, though he does have a Moonlight for 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock now has six Moonlight nominations - two more than Capra and Big Sleep’s Howard Hawks, who are in second with four each.)
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1947:
BLACK NARCISSUS
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET
M. VERDOUX
OUT OF THE PAST
(I told you we’d see Rita Hayworth and Powell & Pressburger again.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1946? Who should win the Moonlight for 1947? Join our community and weigh in!
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