Around last year at this time, when we were all compiling our Top Films of the Decade, I thought back on what the best decade for cinema. In my personal opinion, nothing touches the 1970s. The Godfather Part 1 and 2, Alien, Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange, The Sting, and Chinatown just to name a few favorites. But what if someone objectively researched and compiled date for what truly was the best decade?
Comic Book Movie did just that. Pulling from the best-of lists, notably IMDb Top 250, NYTimes’ The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, Rotten Tomatoes: Top Movies, AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Movies, They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, AMC Filmsite Top Films of All-Time, they used a metric to decipher the “best decade.” Note this certainly isn’t objective, since that is impossible, and consider the very lists they pulled from are mostly crowd-sourced opinions themselves. But it does give us a jumping-off point to talk about our favorite and a quantifiable summary of the best-received decade.
That decade is the 1950’s. Here were the results, with the 2000’s excluded due to not enough lists yet. If you want to see the math, head over to CBM.
Rank. Decade – Average Percent
1. 1950’s – 17.21%
2. 1960’s – 15.24%
3. 1970’s – 13.89%
4. 1940’s – 13.49%
5. 1980’s – 13.19%
6. 1990’s – 12.62%
7. 1930’s – 10.82%
8. 1920’s – 3.55%
With such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, 12 Angry Men, Some Like it Hot, Seven Samurai, Ben-Hur, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Paths of Glory, and The Wages of Fear, it is hard not to argue. Like I mentioned, its not my favorite but it is interesting to see this data. It also puts it into perspective the relatively short life-time of cinema as a medium. We have many more decades ahead of us, where will they fall?
What is your favorite decade for film? Is it the 1950’s?