The Top Ten Movies of 1947

We continue our series on films celebrating 10-year milestones this year – we’ve already done 1997, 1977, 1967, and 1927. Now our time machines take us back to the height of the film noir era: 1947.

Film noir dominates most of the 1940s on Flickchart because Flickchart users generally love film noir – actually, most modern viewers of classic films quite like film noir, thanks to noir’s very modern worldview. Its cynicism makes it feel more real and more immediate than a lot of other classic films. In 1947, it dominates for another reason: 1947 is quite frankly a rather weak year in the annals of classic cinema, and several very solid noirs (and a couple of holiday classics) are quite definitely the best it has to offer.

Why the dearth of great cinema? Maybe the world was still getting back on its feet after the war, struggling to rebuild rather than resist or document an ongoing conflict. Maybe the weariness that’s so prevalent in noir was pervasive throughout the industry in real life. Maybe foreign cinemas especially were having to reassess their place in a post-war world (note that there is not a single foreign-language film in Flickchart’s top ten this year, something that’s rarely happened so far in our tour through the decades). Or maybe some years of cinema are simply better than others.

You can tell looking at the box office winners from 1947 that post-war American audiences weren’t quite ready for all this darkness; only one film from Flickchart’s Top Ten crosses over, and that’s the romantic fantasy The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The rest of the box office leaders are comedies like The Egg and I or romantic costume dramas like Forever Amber, films that have not stood the test of time as well as noir. The Best Picture winner Gentleman’s Agreement made the cut for audiences in 1947, but not for Flickcharters; its message against antisemitism was timely and daring in its time, but heavy-handedness dates it today.

In any case, don’t let me dissuade you from any of THESE films, because however shallow the year may be, these ten films are the cream of the crop, and they deserve their spots.

10. Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley is a film about a guy who says “Yes and” to life just a little too much. He’s not a schemer, he’s not a country boy trying to make good, he’s not even a typical noir lowlife. He’s just Tyrone Power, tall, dark, and simple. Just another Dust Bowl Joe out on the fringes trying to make his way into the center of the American tapestry. But fate, lust, masculine weakness, and the feminine elemental sorcery of which the world is made all conspire to mutate the laws of cause and effect. What use is ambition or hope or even love in the face of being so existentially outnumbered? While I would not call this film an according-to-Hoyle film noir, it manages to express the noir philosophy so much more clearly and boldly, precisely because it is not tied to a set of structures and tropes. No conventional crime story could so completely punish a character; no two-word genre could contain such lessons about the depths of human depravity and suffering… But you should watch it! It’s fun! – Doug van Hollen

Global Ranking #1857
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Wins 46% of its matchups

9. The Bishop’s Wife

The Bishop’s Wife is not the kind of movie that would land in the global top 10 of a more recent year. There is a sweetness and an innocence to it that would simply feel out of place in today’s more cynical world of self-aware commentary. So does it deserve to be in the top 10 of 1947? I think so, thanks to the tremendously talented cast. Our three leads are Loretta Young as the titular character, David Niven as her husband the bishop, and Cary Grant as the angel sent to renew Niven’s faith. All three of these actors bring a sincerity and a likability to their roles, grounding the film in believable characters even when the plot itself is full of sentimentality. Without such strong performers, the script would read much sappier, and we see that in the 1996 remake starring Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston, and Courtney B. Vance. Washington (in the Grant role) is the only standout among the remake cast, and without a strong ensemble to carry it, the script’s cheese takes center stage and the film suffers. The 1940s version packages the same cheesy content in a much more compelling, delightful fashion.

This is one of the holiday-est holiday movies out there, rooted in nostalgia, love, and good will. If you’re someone who dreads the annual onslaught of movies touting the benefits of holiday cheer, this movie isn’t going to change your mind. But if you’re like me and can’t help feeling a tingle of joy at the first hints of the holiday season, The Bishop’s Wife is a lovely little gem that may just become a staple of your December viewing. – Hannah Keefer

Global Ranking #1836
Ranked 6088 times by 465 users
Wins 46% of its matchups

8. Brute Force

There is only one canonical film noir that I would nominate as being too bleak for the genre. Most noirs are creatures of contrast, celebrating the black by showing us tempting glimpses of brightness. But not Brute Force. This film is content to pummel you like Hume Cronyn with a rubber hose for ninety-eight straight minutes, and the white-hot purity of its rage makes you smile as you weep. Eddie Muller called it the most violent studio picture ever made at the time, and regardless of how such things might be measured, there is no doubting director Jules Dassin’s fearlessness in allowing the raw carnage of a long-overdue prison riot to just tear at the celluloid. The film boasts no less than four femme fatales, only ever seen in flashback, and it is their collective reverse-attenuation of feminine power that causes the downfalls of so many men in so many horrible ways. When I live-tweeted TCM’s showing of Brute Force on Noir Alley a few weeks ago, you can tell from the silence in my timeline at which precise point all of the plot’s lines of force have converged and I’m just gaping in horror at the screen. This film is a triumph. – Doug

Global Ranking #1751
Ranked 3936 times by 215 users
Wins 52% of its matchups

7. Dark Passage

Humphrey Bogart is so good you don’t necessarily need to see his face. This film noir utilizes the point-of-view gimmick from The Lady in the Lake to place the audience directly into the claustrophobic spaces of its tense, danger-filled world. It’s an incredible device, but even once the bandages come off and we’re allowed to see the new face that the plastic surgeon has given the escaped criminal, tautness is maintained through brilliant characterizations from the whole cast. Especially Lauren Bacall, who is as strong, beautiful, and complex as she has ever been in what could so easily have been a throwaway role. There are a lot of films where you can see Bogart and Bacall being amazing; what distinguishes this one is stellar work from the supporting players — Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorehead, Tom D’Andrea — each of whom deliver fully formed, committed, and intense performances. The cast proves that it doesn’t take much of a plot to make a helluva picture if you have people in front of and behind the lens that really hit it out of the park. – Doug

Global Ranking #1384
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6. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Gliding effortlessly from atmospheric horror to salty comedy to timeless romance, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is both a classic lover’s classic and a seductive introduction to the charms of 1940s Hollywood. What captivated me as a teenage viewer was the firecracker Rex Harrison as the bearded ghost of a sea captain, barking orders and insults from the dark and dusty corners of his old seaside home. As Harrison proved again and again in movies like Anna and the King of Siam (in which he played the role of King Mongkut later popularized by Yul Brynner in The King and I), Cleopatra (in which his Julius Caesar claimed the young queen of Egypt as war booty), and My Fair Lady (in which he browbeats a poverty-stricken young woman for the untutored way she speaks), he excelled at playing lovable tyrants. His knowingly oblivious, broadly winking form of what we might now call toxic masculinity could not be more out of fashion today, but the hermetic, antique quality of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir — and the fact that he’s a ghost and a swashbuckling seaman, already temporally and culturally alienated from the modern-day of 1947 — makes it easier to appreciate him the way mid-century audiences clearly did. As a 21st-century adult, though, my fascination with this film now revolves around the multifaceted character of Mrs. Muir, played by Gene Tierney of Laura fame, and the questions she raises about the catalysts of creativity and the reliability of memory. On a strictly emotional level, too, Mrs. Muir works; its fantastical final image should be sappy, but reminds me instead of departed loved ones. Not only does Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s supernatural drama win over half of its matchups on Flickchart and easily make the top 10 of 1947, it is also the highest-ranked “The Ghost and…” film by a wide margin, beating The Ghost and the Darkness by over 1000 places and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken by over 3000. – David Conrad

Global Ranking #1209
Ranked 7436 times by 438 users
Wins 51% of its matchups

5. Miracle on 34th Street

The second of two holiday films to hit 1947’s Top Ten, Miracle on 34th Street was a childhood staple for many of us, either in this version or the 1994 remake starring Mara Wilson. Here Natalie Wood is the adorable child who is just at the age to stop believing in Santa Claus… when along comes a bearded gentleman with a merry twinkle in his eye named Kris Kringle who just might be the real thing. Edmund Gwenn is perfect as Kringle, believable as the avatar of holiday cheer but also believable as just a kind old modern-day gent, which leaves the film with a delightful ambiguity perfect to confirm your own six-year-old’s beliefs or doubts (but with a healthy bent toward the fantastic). Maureen O’Hara and John Payne round out the cast as Wood’s mother and her love interest, giving us adults plenty to care about, too, as they navigate the difficult waters of successful parenting of kids just reaching the age of not believing. – Jandy Hardesty

Global Ranking #1126
Ranked 33248 times by 3087 users
Wins 46% of its matchups

4. Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin shed silent cinema once and for all with 1940s The Great Dictator, and with Monsieur Verdoux he left behind the Little Tramp character, who he’d played almost (but not entirely) exclusively since the mid-1910s. In the silent two-reeler era, Chaplin also occasionally played a dapper but usually drunk man about town (memorably in 1916’s One A.M.), and Monsieur Verdoux is closer to that character than the pathos-inducing Tramp. Verdoux invites little pathos, as his main activity is marrying rich women and then poisoning them once he’s secured their money. This is one of the blackest of black comedies, quite a departure for Chaplin, and a pretty delicious one if you can reconcile his changed persona. He doesn’t abandon pathos entirely, though — one reason he’s doing all this is to support his actual family and invalid wife. The film proves one thing once and for all: Chaplin could be just as witty with dialogue as without, and this stands as one of his most bitingly funny films. – Jandy

Global Ranking #828
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3. The Lady from Shanghai

There’s something harsh and unsettling about The Lady from Shanghai, and it’s not just the multiple murders, frame-ups, and plot complications — that’s par for the course for film noir. Orson Welles stars as Michael, a seaman drawn into a murder scheme partially because he’s attracted to Elsa (Rita Hayworth), who’s married to one of the men involved in the crime. Welles was actually married to Hayworth at the time, but the two had been estranged for some time, and she would finalize their divorce at the end of 1947. Hayworth seems to have considered Welles the love of her life, and he also appears to have truly loved her, but they fought constantly over work and home life. For this film he insisted she wear a brassy blonde hairdo rather than her trademark red curls, and throughout the movie they have a strange tension that never made sense to me until I heard the off-screen story. This is Hayworth’s last-ditch effort to truly gain Welles, and Welles’s last-ditch effort to control her, and all of that plays out onscreen, overshadowing all the plot machinations that build to a final showdown among funhouse mirrors. Who is real, who is a mirage, and who can grasp whom? The answer in life and on the screen is no one. – Jandy

Global Ranking #492
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2. Black Narcissus

It’s hard to know where to start in praising Black Narcissus, as it’s just a solid flick all around. On a basic level, the story is interesting and creative, but watching it play out through the cinematic lens of Powell and Pressburger is captivating. There’s a gradual darkening of the film’s mood, a gradual tightening of the tension, until suddenly you find you’re gripping the arm of your chair even though nothing very horrifying has happened yet, because the atmosphere makes you increasingly certain that something horrifying *is* just around the corner. Perhaps the most frequently lauded aspect of the movie is its visual component, and with good reason. The movie is breathtakingly beautiful. From the positioning of characters in each shot to the emotionally driven color palette to the stunning backdrops evoking an unmistakable sense of place, every frame looks great on its own. Put all of this together and you get a distinctive and indelible film experience as well as the second highest-ranked movie of 1947. – Hannah

Global Ranking #275
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1. Out of the Past

When thinking about the descriptive features of film noir (for an excellent checklist, see this infographic), few films tick more boxes than Out of the Past. It’s a dark tale of a man with a dark past, and it shows why escaping that past is no easy task. Director Jacques Tourneur rejoined with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (the two had previously worked together on 1942’s Cat People) to film Daniel Mainwaring’s adaptation of his own novel Build My Gallows High. The studio RKO had a great deal of success in the early 1940s with B-movies (particularly Val Lewton-produced horror films like the aforementioned Cat People), but RKO elevated the budget and cast for Out of the Past. The cast is stellar, with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas clashing amidst swirling cigarette smoke and Jane Greer as the femme fatale tangled up with them. A complicated plot unfolds through flashbacks and double-crosses and good intentions gone bad. The film is a puzzle of motivations and machinations that fit together in multiple ways, and each viewing reveals new angles and nuances that cast different lights on the characters and their interactions. The characters are haunted by their past, but they try to change anyway, hoping for a brighter future and a better tomorrow… and if they can’t change their stripes, perhaps they can change their fates. – Ben Shoemaker

Global Ranking #146
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