The Top 10 Movies of 1957
More than any previous year in our time machine project – this year we’ve done 1997, 1987, 1977, 1967, 1947, 1937, 1927, 1917, 1907 and 1897 – Flickchart’s 1957 list is a global affair. The Swedish master Ingmar Bergman came into his own and delivered not one but two of his greatest opuses. Japan’s Akira Kurosawa followed up his recent string of international successes with a Shakespeare adaptation. The English master David Lean, now remembered for his vibrant widescreen epics, shot his first one in the CinemaScope format. In the year of Sputnik, a Soviet film won the new Palme d’Or for the first time. French and Italian auteurs such as René Clair and Vittorio de Sica added to their filmographies, and box offices in India were booming. The United States, of course, was still the world’s leading dream factory, and over half the spots in our top ten are claimed by domestic studio releases.
Here are the ten, as determined by the global Flickchart community:
10. A Face in the Crowd
In our current era of media-made reality TV celebrity, there has perhaps never been a better time to revisit a film like A Face in the Crowd. When a small-town radio producer (Patricia Neal) discovers a charmingly folksy singer dubbed “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), she sees the makings of a star. What she doesn’t anticipate is how quickly he would rise to national superstardom, how much his audience would support his homespun irreverence, and how much his new-found fame and fortune would corrupt him. Griffith is best known for his radio and television persona that is remarkably similar to Rhodes’ on-air personality, but here he brilliantly subverts that very persona into something nasty and cruel. There are many great media satires in the movies, from Ace in the Hole to Network to The Truman Show, but this one has been unjustly overlooked, and its particular narrative of corrupted everyman innocence and the distorting power of influence and fame (as well as an audience attracted to controversy and outrage) seems particularly relevant today. – Jandy Hardesty
- Global ranking: 410
- 428 users have ranked it
- Wins 63% of matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 16 have it in their top 20
Rank all Media Satires here
9. Nights of Cabiria
Much like the French New Wave that came soon after, the movement known as “Italian neorealism” was conceived by a group of film critics-turned-filmmakers. Both were social movements as much as they were artistic ones, but unlike the French New Wave, Italian neorealism was born of a country that had just been on the losing side in the greatest war in history and was still reeling from the effects of their fallen fascist government and Nazi occupation. It was out of this economic and political reality that writer/director Federico Fellini arose. Nights of Cabiria is one of the later films of the movement, and also one of Fellini’s last before he began making those surrealistic films that we now think of when we say “Fellini-esque.”
Nights follows its title character, a prostitute self-named “Cabiria,” on her journeys through and around the city of Rome. Her occupational exploits allow her (and us) to witness the spectrum of post-war Roman life, from the abject poverty of a colony of cave-dwellers on the city’s outskirts to the domestic opulence of one of Italy’s movie stars. Both extremes send shock waves through her. She doesn’t exactly live in squalor (she is very proud of the fact that she owns her own tiny house out in a poor section of town), but neither is her life seemingly headed anywhere promising. These realizations put her on a compelling spiritual journey as well, as she longs for human love and seeks out divine grace.
This film and the world it depicts might seem a lot grimmer were it not for the resilient nature of Cabiria and the life and humor breathed into her by Giulietta Masina, especially given the trajectory her life takes throughout its course. Masina had a gift for subtle physical comedy that, in a huge credit to Fellini, somehow never feels out of place in this underworld of prostitution. Cabiria as a character, and especially her final scene, act as a powerful foil against the cynicism and despair that could so easily befall when one’s world is in tatters.
Also notably featuring script work by Pier Paolo Passolini and music by Nino Rota (who would go on to score The Godfather), Nights of Cabiria is essential viewing that earns its venerated place on this and so many other lists of great cinema. – Tom Kapr
- Global ranking: 305
- 687 users have ranked it
- Wins 60% of matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 30 have it in their top 20
Rank all Italian Neorealism films here
8. Witness for the Prosecution
Witness for the Prosecution (1957) is a courtroom drama film adapted from a stage play written by Agatha Christie (which was adapted from her own short story). Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed the film during the peak of his later career (his next two films were Some Like It Hot and The Apartment). Wilder’s touch subtly elevates the material beyond mere stagebound drama yet places the focus squarely on his powerful cast. The movie features several great actors near the ends of their careers: Tyrone Power in his last role, Marlene Dietrich in a late-career tour de force, and Charles Laughton as bombastic as ever in one of his few acting roles after directing The Night of the Hunter. The film also features Laughton’s wife Elsa Lanchester in a role created for the film that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The performances are all strong individually and in combination with each other, heightening in intensity as the story reveals layer after layer. Some films diminish over time as their impact and influence are absorbed into the culture at large, but Witness for the Prosecution has a vitality and power that preserve its position as a preeminent whodunit still capable of captivating and surprising new audiences. – Ben Shoemaker
- Global ranking: 225
- 1543 users have ranked it
- Wins 51% of matchups
- 2 users have it at #1
- 41 have it in their top 20
Rank all Whodunit movies here
7. The Bridge on the River Kwai
In most prison movies, it is taken for granted that the prisoners will try to escape. For a prisoner of war, escape may even be considered a duty. What sets Kwai apart – other than its breathtaking CinemaScope vistas, earworm score, and multiple award-winning cast – is that it creates scenes of excrutiating tension in a prison setting while totally eschewing the conventions of an escape film. William Holden‘s character escapes the Japanese POW camp with a minimum of fuss in the opening act, but only to set up the tragic irony that his own superiors force him to go back. Meanwhile Alec Guinness‘s Colonel Nicholson banishes all thought of escaping his captors and spends his energies on far more dubious battles of will. Nicholson’s stubborn defiance is initially thrilling, and follows the us-versus-them dynamic of standard prison films, but it turns maddening, horrifying, and finally pitiable when he begins to use that same stubbornness in service of his enemies’ aims. Like Conrad’s Kurtz and Kwai director David Lean‘s T.E. Lawrence, Nicholson’s long sojourn in alien territory raises existential questions about identity, loyalty, duty, accountability, and even sanity. Cultural and geographic isolation did not break these men; it caused the already broken parts of them to thrive. The depth of Kwai’s ideas and the grandeur of their presentation transcend not only other prison films, but most other war movies, epics, and Best Picture winners to boot. – David Conrad
- Global ranking: 189
- 15236 users have ranked it
- Wins 53% of matchups
- 55 users have it at #1
- 1108 have it in their top 20
Rank all Prison Films here
6. Sweet Smell of Success
Sweet Smell of Success’s initial screening was nothing short of a disaster. Audiences didn’t respond well to their major screen icons Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster stepping out of their typecasted roles. Curtis had been largely known as a comedic actor, but instead plays a smarmy scheming flunky to the corrupt newspaper columnist played by Lancaster. Perhaps audiences simply weren’t ready to handle a film noir this dark and uncompromising. This film is cynical enough to make the toughest of hearts cringe. Its tale of manipulation and power doesn’t offer lighthearted relief or even heart-tugging poignancy. What it does is present a smart and witty script that offers an unyielding criticism of what happens when power goes unchecked.
Director Alexander Mackendrick is largely forgotten, but his highest-ranking movie is rightly remembered as a darkly compelling tale. Due to two quite great performances, Curtis and Lancaster give us characters that you can’t help but watch despite the urge to turn away. Curtis’s character is caught between a moral compass and his drive to emulate Lancaster’s powerful writer. It’s a dynamic that many can relate to: knowing what the right thing to do is, but being swayed by powerful outside influences. This drama carries us throughout the film as we struggle and sympathize with Curtis’s Falco and wonder which way he will go.
Success is visually stunning. Shadows abound in a great example of the noir style. The camera seems to draw on the dark essence of corporate New York and captures something sinister residing within all of us. Pair that with a sharp noir script, and you’ve got one of the best examples of what the genre could do. – Connor Adamson
- Global ranking: 126
- 1138 users have ranked it
- Wins 57% of matchups
- 3 users have it at #1
- 48 have it in their top 20
Rank all Film Noirs here
5. Throne of Blood
There is a scene in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in which a Klingon general tells the Enterprise crew, “You have not read Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Likewise for Japanese – fans of the Bard have not seen MacBeth until they have seen Toshiro Mifune in the lead role. The rise and fall of an ambitious general, goaded by a conniving wife and haunted by ghosts and soothsayers, works wonderfully in the context of medieval Japan. A peak-form Akira Kurosawa envelopes the story in mist and magic, and Mifune triples down on the intoxicatingly deranged persona he embodied for Rashomon and Seven Samurai. His scowling, mustachioed face, and the cagey, insinuating face of his wife (Isuzu Yamada), are modeled on masks used in Japanese Noh theater in an example of the movie’s harmonious blend of Western and Eastern dramatic traditions. Throne of Blood (whose Japanese title translates to “Spiderweb Castle”) did not initially receive the kinds of awards and accolades that went to Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai, but it is now considered not only one of Kurosawa’s best films, but one of the best Shakespeare adaptations in cinema. – David
- Global ranking: 110
- 1416 users have ranked it
- Wins 63% of matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 69 have it in their top 20
Rank all Based-on-Shakespeare films here
4. Wild Strawberries
Ingmar Bergman was under forty when he made Wild Strawberries, a film about an elderly man regretting his life’s emphasis on career over family. Yet it wasn’t old age that fascinated Bergman, who once explained the film by confessing “I am forever living in my childhood.” It was the shaping influences of youth that preoccupied him, and the guilt of having lived less beatifically than children ideally do. The protagonist in Wild Strawberries, played by Bergman’s fellow Swedish director Victor Sjöström, returns mentally to the happy and bittersweet childhood whose people and places he left behind in pursuit of a successful but soulless academic career. This sounds sentimental, but it’s a soberer and somberer affair than the description suggests; a squabbling couple in a car is a prefiguration of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? couple, and there is no Scrooge-esque moment of conversion in which the old professor flings open the shuttered windows of his life or runs jubilantly through the streets. A tearful smile is the most Bergman will allow, but coming from one so self-tortured, it is a powerfully redemptive moment. – David
- Global ranking: 83
- 1648 users have ranked it
- Wins 59% of matchups
- 11 users have it at #1
- 143 have it in their top 20
Rank all Reunion Films here
3. The Seventh Seal
A knight errant, a wager for the soul, a dance with death; Bergman films are always existential, but rarely so extravagantly arrayed. The medieval setting still has the director’s trademark austerity – the village is poor, the walls are bare, the faces matter more than the clothes – but with elemental ingredients Bergman arranges unusually grand visual feasts that are still striking and have inspired everything from murals to comedy films to that most mimetic of pop culture bellweathers, dormroom posters. Bergman holds his close-ups and two-shots long enough for the images to burn into our minds, and long enough to think about what his characters are saying. When it comes to dialogue Bergman is a bit more oblique here than in his present-day films, giving his medieval protagonist such effortful lines as “I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.” But Bergman’s defining trait, a guilt-ridden brand of agnosticism, is expressed clearly enough when the knight asks, “What will happen to us who want to believe, but cannot? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can’t I kill God in me?” The deliverer of these lines is Bergman’s frequent leading man Max von Sydow, and this is Flickchart’s highest-ranked of his films. It is also a must-see work of world cinema, especially if you already own the poster. – David
- Global ranking: 71
- 4798 users have ranked it
- Wins 58% of matchups
- 47 users have it at #1
- 472 have it in their top 20
Rank all Period Films here
2. Paths of Glory
In 1957, director Stanley Kubrick was still largely unknown. He had directed several short films and put together some successes with his early features. Though his film The Killing made very little money, it impressed critics and studio executives enough that he was given the budget and script for Paths of Glory. Calling it a war film almost feels like a misnomer due to a large part of the film’s drama centering on a court martial defended by Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax; it’s a courtroom drama first and foremost. Even so, there is a central battle scene that Kubrick films beautifully and that signals his arrival as a mature voice in the world of cinema.
Paths of Glory is a commentary on truth, cowardice, and the meaning of honor. Douglas’s Dax struggles against a system that glorifies values he opposes. Soldiers are forced into suicidal battle for the glory of another commander. The meaning of a man’s sacrifice in service to his country is interrogated in a powerful way. The performances capture this well, with Douglas conveying Dax’s stubbornness and sense of honor. Adolphe Menjou is another standout in the cast, portraying the friendly yet cold indifference of a Major General with a frightening realism.
All the acting in the world can’t distract from the mastery behind the camera. Kubrick makes this a spellbinding film from start to finish with his highly skilled finesse of the camera and tight pacing. Even the courtroom scenes are visually captivating. That this movie still stands as one of Kubrick’s best is a testament to his ability at all stages of his career. – Connor
- Global ranking: 57
- 5716 users have ranked it
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 19 users have it at #1
- 391 have it in their top 20
Rank all Anti-War Films here
1. 12 Angry Men
It’s difficult for me to think of a one-room drama more suspenseful and satisfying than 12 Angry Men. The word that most sums it up for me is “tight,” both in the sense of the perfect script that pulls along its story piece by piece with no wasted energy, and in the sense of the claustrophobia that closes in on these jurors as their deliberations get more personal and more tense. The camera work heightens this sense of claustrophobia, transitioning from wider group shots to primarily close-ups by the end of the film.
Henry Fonda is the crux here, of course, but every actor brings to life a unique character with their own motivations, and it’s astonishing how much we get to know them as the story plays out. There’s a 1997 TV remake starring Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role, and since it relies heavily on the same script it is almost as good, but feels much more stage-y. The original version is deliberately cinematic, using the camera to enhance, rather than just document, the impatience and discomfort of the characters. It’s simply one of the all-time greats. – Hannah Keefer
- Global ranking: 47
- 28842 users have ranked it
- Wins 58% of matchups
- 291 users have it at #1
- 3746 have it in their top 20
Rank all Based-on-Theater films here
BLOGGER’S PICKS
Here are some picks from below the cutoff that we think are worthy of special consideration:
Jandy – What’s Opera, Doc?
Chuck Jones is the greatest cartoon director of all time for a lot of reasons: introducing characters like Road Runner and Coyote, Elmer Fudd, and Marvin the Martian; fusing heart with comedy in shorts like Feed the Kitty; focusing on verbal gags rather than sight gags (the Rabbit/Duck hunting trilogy); and turning Daffy Duck from a one-note crazy loon to a complex character capable of undergoing an existential crisis in Duck Amuck. But perhaps his most risky move, the one that seems the furthest removed from what other cartoon directors were doing in the 1950s, was infusing Wagnerian opera into a Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd chase-the-wabbit scenario – and taking it seriously. Now he had dabbled in opera before, with The Rabbit of Seville, but that short has Bugs and Elmer stumbling into a theatrical performance and just sort of playing along. Here, Jones and his frequent story collaborator Michael Maltese set the entire story within the operatic world, never breaking out of it. The film benefits greatly from some of art director Maurice Noble’s best design, befitting the melodramatic story. Jones’ best short films stand up against features, and this is definitely one of the best.
- Global ranking: 1679
- 890 users have ranked it
- Wins 52% of matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 26 have it in their top 20
Rank all Cartoons here
Connor – Jailhouse Rock
Jailhouse Rock could be seen as a vanity piece for Elvis Presley. It many ways, it is. It sets the formula down for musical biopics too, a trend seen as scourge to some within cinema circles. But where many of these films are made long after the musician had departed, this one actually stars the artist that it is about. To be fair, this movie isn’t exactly a biopic; creative liberties were taken in developing the story of this character who isn’t really Elvis. But clearly much of this film’s story was designed to play on the image that Elvis had cultivated of being a rocker living on the edge. So while not a biopic in the strictest sense, it still serves as a template for the more true-to-life films that would come.
Either way, Jailhouse Rock is just pure fun. The story of the musician whose fame goes to his head is one that works even when the writing of the character makes him fairly unsympathetic. But Elvis’s natural charisma nails the movie in place and guides us where many other actors might have failed. The use of Elvis also ensures that the music is great. Funnily enough, all the music had to be dubbed during post-production due to Elvis suffering an injury that prevented him from singing while filming.
That doesn’t stop the iconic “Jailhouse Rock” dance scene from being any less entertaining. The prolific Richard Thorpe was more than just a by-the-numbers director, exhibiting a visual panache that makes this movie worth watching decades later. Jailhouse Rock may be the one film that best captures Elvis’s performing personality, and is the essential cinematic experience for this era of rock and its culture. Add in some great music and an engaging story and you’ve got a winner.
- Global rank: 3276
- 577 users have ranked it
- Wins 36% of matchups
- 1 user has it at #1
- 7 have it in their top 20
Rank all Musical Dramas here
David – 3:10 to Yuma
The original 3:10 to Yuma has been ranked by about 2% as many people as the 2007 remake, which may be one of the most lopsided ratios in the long history of remakes. Like the far more fêted High Noon, it is a morality play in Western get-up, and pits its protagonist against a clock ticking toward doom. Like Shane, it sings the praises of simple, clean, family farming, but knows the dangers and temptations that beset those on that righteous path. Like Rio Bravo, it’s a hostage movie with multiple virtuoso performances. It’s smarter, tenser, and better acted than all of those classics of the genre, comes from a short story by the acclaimed Elmore Leonard, and has been released by Criterion, so why haven’t you seen it? Glenn Ford and Van Heflin aren’t household names, but as a worldly outlaw and careworn sodbuster they shine. Precisely because they aren’t Lee van Cleef and John Wayne, we cannot be certain about which one will win their long standoff. That uncertainty is rare in a 1950s Western, and it pays off with an ending that is, if not totally believable, at least unexpected. Fans of the surprisingly popular remake, or of Westworld‘s marriage of shoot-em-up with high-concept intellectualism, should seek this one out.
- Global rank: 1673
- 594 users have ranked it
- Wins 54% of matchups
- 0 users have it at #1
- 5 have it in their top 20