1953's Best Movies: 70 Years Later

In keeping with previous polls, I've gone with the contenders in the top 2,000 films, but they now offer the entire starting spreadsheet. Here are the titles that carry through through the top 5,000 films ever.

2160	3731	Glen or Glenda?	Wood Jr., Edward D.	1953	USA	61
2249	3841	Bigamist, The	Lupino, Ida	1953	USA	80
2373	2810	End, The	Maclaine, Christopher	1953	USA	35
2395	1974	Statues Also Die	Cloquet, Ghislain/Chris Marker/Alain Resnais	1953	France	30
2616	2398	Do Bigha Zamin	Roy, Bimal	1953	India	131
2633	1837	Stalag 17	Wilder, Billy	1953	USA	120
2676	2438	Peter Pan	Geronimi, Clyde/Hamilton Luske/Wilfred Jackson	1953	USA	77
3247	3205	5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., The	Rowland, Roy	1953	USA	88
3365	2671	Kiss Me Kate	Sidney, George	1953	USA	109
3583	3474	Japanese Tragedy, A	Kinoshita, Keisuke	1953	Japan	116
3626	4283	Love of a Woman, The	Grémillon, Jean	1953	France	104
3686	2646	Invaders From Mars	Menzies, William Cameron	1953	USA	78
3749	3676	Cangaceiro, O	Barreto, Lima	1953	Brazil	105
3811	3823	White Mane	Lamorisse, Albert	1953	France	40
3814	4274	Niagara	Hathaway, Henry	1953	USA	89
3947	4833	Illusion Travels by Streetcar	Buñuel, Luis	1953	Mexico	90
3950	11427	Love Letter	Tanaka, Kinuyo	1953	Japan	98
4228	4964	Great Adventure, The	Sucksdorff, Arne	1953	Sweden	73
4373	4669	Lady Without Camelias, The	Antonioni, Michelangelo	1953	Italy	105
4514	3161	In the Face of Demolition	Li Tie	1953	Hong Kong	130
4534	6706	Eaux d'artifice	Anger, Kenneth	1953	USA	12
4638	3683	Traviata '53	Cottafavi, Vittorio	1953	Italy	95
4793	3808	Blue Gardenia, The	Lang, Fritz	1953	USA	90
4880	3857	Vie d'un honnête homme, La	Guitry, Sacha	1953	France	85
4979	3667	Wild One, The	Benedek, Laszlo	1953	USA	79

Angel Face
El
Earrings of Madame De...
Pickup on South Street
Tokyo Story
Ugetsu
The Wages of Fear

One of these. Probably El or Earrings.

From Here to Eternity and The Big Heat are great, but Roman Holiday. (Haven't seen the obvious winner in a while--there's an Ozu film I like better.)

Top 5:

Duck Amuck
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Pickup on South Street
Ugetsu
The Band Wagon

Oh, forgot The Big Heat, my favorite American Lang.

The Band Wagon is top tier 50's MGM, great next place to go after Singin' In The Rain.

Duck Amuck is of course a masterpiece.

The Hitch Hiker is kinda perfect at what it's doing, just a great compact noir thriller. Female director, all male cast.

Really chomping at the bit to see Kinuyo Tanaka's Love Letter.

Only seen 10 of these. It's either I Vitelloni, my favourite Fellini, or Monika. Sawdust and Tinsel is impressive but heavy-handed by comparison.
Wonder if Shane will get any votes.

I have a lot of knee-jerk hostility toward Shane but admit it's gone basically unexamined for decades.

Haha was gonna post "Shane suxx" but yeah it's been over a decade for me too.

Really chomping at the bit to see Kinuyo Tanaka's _Love Letter_.

have seen Shane in recent years and have no qualms saying it suxx

Aside from the Ozu -- Madame de, Hulot's Holiday, Vitelloni, War of the Worlds, Naked Spur, & Wages are all on regular rotation in my house. Ophüls probably wins, for me.

I don't love Shane, but I don't hate it. The death-of-the-western angle has since been done to death, and better, but that was still a relatively new idea in 1953. I can, as with High Noon, enjoy it through the filter of McCarthy, and its connection to Hud via Brandon deWilde also resonates with me.

Shane suxx

Shane gets some points for being sampled on "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking".

I list fireworks, the sound of vodka in a martini shaker, and Brandon deWilde whining SHAAAAANE among the most irritating noises produced by man.

Can't not vote Duck Amuck, but of the 12 I've seen here, I love or at least really like most of them. The Hitch-Hiker making the Top 2,000 makes me happy.

Shane is...fine, but not even the best Western on the list.

lol at the risk of seeming one-upmanish that's still generous imo, it ain't even in the top5 best westerns on that list

Ridiculously great year. I've seen every film that made it into the poll except A Geisha (though I see it was released in the UK on a so-so Blu-ray back in 2012, so maybe I'll look for that.)

These are my favorites, but I really shouldn't rank them - every one's a masterpiece:

Tokyo Story [Yasujirô Ozu]
Madame de… [Max Ophüls]
Ugetsu [Kenji Mizoguchi]
The Band Wagon [Vincente Minnelli]
The Sun Shines Bright [John Ford]
Mr. Hulot's Holiday [Jacques Tati]
The Naked Spur [Anthony Mann]
I Vitelloni [Federico Fellini]
Pickup on South Street [Samuel Fuller]
Angel Face [Otto Preminger]
The Lady Without Camelias [Michelangelo Antonioni]
Duck Amuck [Charles M. Jones]
Anatahan [Josef von Sternberg]
Sawdust and Tinsel [Ingmar Bergman]
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [Howard Hawks]

(the rest in the poll aren't bad at all, they're all good to different degrees)

Truth be told, I'm not a big fan of George Stevens in general. Shane, Giant and A Place in the Sun aren't bad movies, there's even things that I find great about all them (usually a performance), but they're all kind of underwhelming too. Swing Time may be the only one I'd see again, but that has more to do with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

I saw it somewhat later than the rest, but The Band Wagon, for me, has nothing on Top Hat and Swing Time.

Don't think The Band Wagon is really trying to do the same thing as Top Hat and Swing Time, despite the presence of Astaire.

And of course Glen or Glenda? is one of the great American statements of all time

George Stevens was a consistently good director of light comedy until WWII got to him.

Alice Adams, Swing Time, Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town, The More the Merrier -- I mean.

I recall his material being the most interesting in Five Came Back (much the same way as Doctor Dolittle's was the most interesting in Pictures at a Revolution)

Man, I'd take ANY of Vincente Minnelli's great musicals over an Astaire & Rogers vehicle. I don't mean that as a knock on Astaire or Rogers, their films' claim to greatness lies with them, but the movies themselves rarely transcended the formulaic approach they consciously followed. Minnelli's work is just brilliant in every way, and just on a technical level, the filmmaking in something like The Band Wagon feels like it has a lot more life and vitality.

I just saw Woman of the Year again recently, and that's another movie where if it wasn't for the great pair of leads I would never watch again. I remember some of the filmmaking choices feeling awkward, like a dolly shot for the first time they kiss - it comes off more awkward and forced rather than giving the moment the extra power he was probably looking for - and the ending still feels pretty horrible to me. (IIRC, an entirely different ending was written but they wanted to take Hepburn's character down a peg.)

I likely owe The Band Wagon a fresh viewing, but I prefer the lightness (for lack of a better term) of something like Top Hat to The Band Wagon, though that may just be an aesthetic preference for 30s commercial filmmaking vs. 50s, at least when it comes to things like musicals.

By no means a Minnelli hater, though: in spite of my statement above, I do consider Meet Me in St. Louis to be just about the pinnacle of the genre.

I won't choose between Minnelli and Stevens, but I agree Woman of the Year does little for me. I can't stand how this and The Philadelphia Story consistently humiliate Hepburn even when the filmmakers strongly suggest Spencer Tracy gets as much (or more!) out of their relationship.

YES absolutely - and The Philadelphia Story is usually the one Hepburn film everybody seems to recommend. There are a lot of films I really like by Hepburn and Cukor, but that's definitely not one of them.

xp Meet Me in St. Louis may be my favorite too. I think BAM had a complete Minnelli retrospective around 2010 and that really opened my eyes on his work. I had seen maybe two or three of his films before then, but I was just floored but the quality and consistency of his work, through comedies, dramas and musicals alike. And he just has this warm and humane (but never simple or overly sentimental) perspective in his work that felt very welcome. He really is up there with the greatest studio system directors.

The Clock plays as if it were a musical.

I strongly don't like The Philadelphia Story tbh

I don't love it either. Adam's Rib is way better.

It wakes up whenever Cary Grant shows up just like Judy Holliday and David Wayne shake up Adam's Rib.

Pat & Mike's my favorite of the Hepburn-Tracy pictures: the focus on action keeps us from lingering on the gender inequities.

I'm not one of those The Band Wagon > Singin' in the Rain musical-auteurist types, but I definitely do love The Band Wagon

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

That’s right.

MIssed out on voting for Hitch Hiker

Would anyone in 2023 agree with my Movies on TV guide (from 1981) that in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes "Hawks keeps topping perversity with perversity"? Don't fans of perversity go elsewhere these days? Or even 42 years ago?