When it comes to movie history, some years are better - and worse - than others. 1939 had The Wizard of Oz, The Rules of the Game, and Gone With The Wind leading a stellar class. In 1940, Disney released Fantasia and Pinocchio, John Ford directed The Grapes of Wrath, Hitchcock gave us Rebecca, and we got two of the greatest romantic comedies ever made in His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story - and yet none of those films could top The Great Dictator as our best picture. And in 1946, the year we just left, It’s A Wonderful Life led a crop of films that also included Notorious, The Big Sleep, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Great years, all.
And then there’s 1947, which - as we’ll see - you could argue was the worst year ever in cinema history. (Not our judgment, just the numbers!) Very few films stand out from that year - but of the choices, which one stands out amongst the rest?
To identify the Best Picture of 1947, 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
In our research, we consulted nearly a dozen well-known rankings of the “best” films of all time: Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade poll of critics and directors; the BBC’s list of the best American films and the best foreign-language films; the AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list; top-100 lists from Leonard Maltin and the National Society of Film Critics; a 2014 Harris poll of Americans’ all-time favorite film; and surveys from Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and Empire. For every year we’re covering, from 1930 to 2009, we found at least one film that showed up in at least one of those lists. Some years were pretty lean - All Quiet on the Western Front was the only 1930 film that got even a single mention; Raiders of the Lost Ark is pretty much the only one from 1981 - but every year was represented somewhere.
Except 1947. On all of those rankings I mentioned, there’s not a single 1947 film anywhere.
So it’s slim pickings this year, it seems. But we can dig deeper! Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, but the website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. Still, TSPDT’s list includes only five films from 1947, the fewest of any year we’ve seen since 1936:
(173) Black Narcissus
(188) Out of the Past
(295) Monsieur Verdoux
(722) The Ghost & Mrs. Muir
(942) Odd Man Out
(In fact we won’t see another year with so few entries until we get to 2007.)
With Black Narcissus, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have TSPDT’s highest-ranking film of the year for the second time this decade (joining 1943’s Life & Death of Col. Blimp). The Archers are critical darlings, to say the least: 1947 is their fifth straight year of being included in TSPDT’s top 1000, and they’ll make it six in a row in 1948 with The Red Shoes.
Beyond that, there isn’t much from 1947, though a couple other films do place fairly well: Jacques Tourneur, whose Cat People we loved back in 1942, returns with the noir classic Out of the Past, and Charlie Chaplin is back for the first time since Great Dictator with the black comedy Monsieur Verdoux. Those are the leaders of the pack for 1947 - so far.
General Audiences
But which films from 1947 do general audiences still watch?
(Hell, are there any films from 1947 that 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 March 2, 2021):
Miracle on 34th Street (41,765 votes)
Out of the Past (33,047)
The Lady From Shanghai (27,215)
Black Narcissus (22,102)
Dark Passage (17,800)
Monsieur Verdoux (15,989)
The Ghost & Mrs. Muir (15,921)
The Bishop's Wife (15,203)
Gentleman's Agreement (14,857)
The Paradine Case (10,172)
No surprise here: Miracle on 34th Street, the holiday classic, is the favorite among today’s audiences, with Out of the Past and Black Narcissus again near the top and Orson Welles’ weird noir The Lady From Shanghai also entering the fray. (Monsieur Verdoux also makes the top six, but it’s the least popular feature of Chaplin’s long career.)
Again, though, 1947 is a lean year, arguably the leanest ever, when it comes to films that still appeal to moviegoers. With 41,765 votes, Miracle on 34th Street is easily the most-viewed movie of the year - but it’s only 26th among all films from the 1940s. In fact, to find another year where Miracle would be the top votegetter, you’d have to go all the way back to 1923! (And let’s be honest: Safety Last and Our Hospitality are critically underviewed.)
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 1947 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.)
The Lady From Shanghai (6) 115
Black Narcissus (3) 95
Out of the Past (1) 87
M. Verdoux (3) 77
Miracle on 34th St (1) 56
Quai des Orfevres 56
Gentleman's Agreement (1) 45
Crossfire 44
The Ghost & Mrs Muir 41
Odd Man Out 41
Body and Soul (1) 32
Dark Passage 19
Kiss of Death 13
Nightmare Alley 13
Fireworks (1) 10
Pursued 8
The Red House 7
T-Men 6
Born To Kill 5
Daisy Kenyon 4
Once again, there’s quite a bit of overlap between our expert panelists and general audiences. Our panel’s top five choices - Shanghai, Narcissus, Past, Verdoux, and Miracle - all made IMDB’s top six as well, and that list also includes TSPDT’s top three as well. (The overlap isn’t exact, though: tied for fifth with Miracle is the French police drama Quai des Orfevres, which doesn’t register with general audiences. Likewise, general audiences gravitated to the Bogey/Bacall thriller Dark Passage, which our panelists mostly rejected.)
And worth noting further down: one of our panelists gave their first-place vote to a write-in, Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic short Fireworks - not well known today with general audiences, but one of the earliest explicitly gay films ever made.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
This year it’s pretty easy. We started with Black Narcissus, Out of the Past, and M. Verdoux getting the most support from critics - and all three films also get support from general audiences and our expert panel, so they’re all in. Miracle on 34th Street is the one 1947 film that still attracts ordinary moviegoers; it didn’t do quite as well with our panel, but it still made their top five too. And Lady From Shanghai was easily the winner with our panel and also makes the top three with general audiences, so it’s a lock as well.
There are a handful of 1947 films that deserve honorable mention. Gentleman’s Agreement, Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winner, makes the top ten in most of our metrics, as does The Ghost & Mrs. Muir; and we got some general-audience love for Dark Passage and some support from our panel for Quai des Orfevres. But none of them quite match up to our top five.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1947 are:
BLACK NARCISSUS
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET MONSIEUR VERDOUX
OUT OF THE PAST
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s easy to pick the top five, but it’s a lot harder this year to identify a clear winner. We can eliminate Monsieur Verdoux first, since it trails both Black Narcissus and Out of the Past in every metric - but then it gets trickier. The top film with general audiences is Miracle on 34th Street, but it didn’t do well with our panel; the panelists favored Lady From Shanghai, but that film didn’t make the cut with critics. Out of the Past and Black Narcissus are the two films that rate highly on every metric - but neither film stands out from the other.
You could make a case for any of those four - but with no obvious standout, we’ll take the opportunity to honor the Archers, Powell and Pressburger, for an impressive run of consistently great films through the 1940s. So far they’ve come up short every year - but Black Narcissus is the highest-ranking film of 1947 with critics, a close second with our panel, and among the most popular movies of the year with contemporary audiences. (Plus it just got its own BBC remake. Let’s see Lady From Shanghai say that.)
And so: congratulations to Black Narcissus, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1947!
And here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1948:
BICYCLE THIEVES
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
THE RED SHOES
ROPE
TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1947? Who should win the Moonlight for 1948? Join our community and weigh in!
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