What is Your Favorite Classic Film? Who Are Your Favorite Stars? The 2011 Classic Film Survey Has Answers

Last month, the Cafe surveyed over 125 classic film lovers as part of its first annual Classic Film Survey. The survey's final question proved to be the most difficult for many survey participants: "What is your favorite: film, actress, actor and director?"

Several people stated it was too difficult to pick just one of each category. Others noted: "If you asked me the same question tomorrow, my answers would be different." Still, most of the surveyed film fans listed their favorites and here are the results.

What is your favorite film?

This was the most diverse of the four "favorite" categories, with the results being spread among 61 motion pictures. They ranged from silent films (Sherlock Jr.) to movies from the early 1980s (e.g., Raging Bull). Surprisingly, there were a number of foreign-language films, such as Seven Samurai, Cinema Paradiso, Babette's Feast, and Yojimbo. However, the top vote-getter was no surprise at all, with Casablanca earning the honors. Here are the top six films:

Casablanca (10.8%)
Gone With the Wind (6.5%)
North by Northwest (4.3%)
Philadelphia Story (4.3%)
Citizen Kane (3.2%)
Vertigo (3.2%)

Other films with more than one vote: All About Eve, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, It's a Wonderful Life, My Man Godfrey, Notorious, Random Harvest, and The Thin Man.

Who is your favorite actress?

It was a two-person race in this category and, in the end, Bette Davis emerged as the top vote-getter with 14.3% of the total. The only actress to come near that percentage was Katharine Hepburn with 10.9%. What's interesting about Bette's popularity is that only one of her films--All About Eve--garnered any support as favorite film. The implication is that, in some cases, star appeal transcends the films featuring the star.

Thirty-five actresses received at least one vote. There were silent film actresses (Lillian Gish), foreign-language stars (Jeanne Moreau, Claudia Cardinale), and recent screen favorites (Naomi Watts). Here are the top six actresses:

Bette Davis (14.3%)
Katharine Hepburn (10.9%)
Barbara Stanwyck (6.5%)
Audrey Hepburn (6.5%)
Jean Arthur (5.5%)
Myrna Loy (5.5%)

Other actresses with more than one vote: Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, Vivian Leigh, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, and Natalie Wood.

Who is your favorite actor?

The resounding answer is Cary Grant. Mr. Grant dominated in the actor category, crushing his competitors with 31% of the total votes. What's impressive about his "victory" is that the question was an open-ended one. Thus, with no choices on a form to select from, 31% of the survey participants typed in Cary Grant as their favorite actor.

James Stewart was a distant No. 2 with 12% of the votes. Still, he was a clear second choice, outdistancing the rest of the pack by at least 8%. Furthermore, Stewart's 12% was almost enough to win any other category.

With Grant and Stewart collecting so many votes, it's somewhat surprising that the remaining votes were spread among 47 actors. Several current performers made the list, to include George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Alan Rickman. A single vote prevented many Hollywood favorites, such as John Wayne and Ronald Colman, from being shut out totally. Here are the top five actors:

Cary Grant (31%)
James Stewart (12%)
Humphrey Bogart (4%)
Errol Flynn (3%)
James Cagney (3%)

Other actors with more than one vote: Leslie Howard, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, and Anton Walbrook.

Who is your favorite director?

The expected winner--Alfred Hitchcock--was the top choice with 28% of the votes. His total more than doubled that of second-place finisher Billy Wilder. Still, it wasn't the landslide that I expected. Once again, classic film fans proved to possess a wide range of tastes. This category, in particular, reflected a fondness for foreign-language cinema with votes being cast for Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Jacques Tati, Erich Von Stroheim, Rene Clair, Federico Fellini, Jean Cocteau, Pedro Almodovar, and even John Woo. The top six directors were:

Alfred Hitchcock (28.4%)
Billy Wilder (13.7%)
Frank Capra (7.4%)
John Ford (4.2%)
Howard Hawks (4.2%)
George Stevens (4.2%)

Other directors with more than one vote: Ingmar Bergman, Charles Chaplin, George Cukor, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Otto Preminger, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, and William Wyler.

A Special Thanks

I want to personally thank everyone who voted in the 2011 Classic Film Survey. It's been a lot of fun to analyze and share the results. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from the Cafe's fans on Twitter. In fact, we're already thinking up questions for the 2012 survey, which we'll launch next November!

What Is a Classic Film? Survey says....

Ask the average person on the street to define "classic film" and your answer is likely to be: "An old black and white movie." Ask the same question to a classic film fan and you will get a myriad of responses. As I tried to craft my own definition, I decided to gather input from the experts and thus published the Cafe's first annual Classic Film Survey. Over 125 classic film enthusiasts from across the internet participated. My thanks to each of them, especially the many who took extra time to leave thought-provoking comments at the end of the survey.

Age Does Matter
One question that intrigued me was whether age played a significant role in defining "classic" (an issue that certainly applies to other forms of art as well). The answer is a resounding "yes" from two-thirds of the respondents. So then, how old does a film have to be before it's considered a classic? Survey respondents identified the 1960s and 1970s as the decades which formed the start points for classic status. Each of those decades received about 30% of the total votes, with the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s sharing the rest (each earning between 12% and 15%).

West Side Story: A classic within a decade?

Think of the responses in another way: The survey's findings indicate that a film must be over 30 years old before it's considered a classic! Certainly, that hasn't always been true. When I took film courses in college in the last 1970s, West Side Story and To Kill a Mockingbird were already considered classics--and they had been made a scant 16 years earlier (of course, both were based on earlier works, which may have impacted their classic status). Still, I can think of numerous 1960s films that were considered classics by the following decade. So why is the overwhelming perception now that a film must be at least three decades old to be classic?

Richard Widmark and Wayne--still stars
in the 1960s.

One possibility suggested by a handful of survey respondents is that the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s created stars that were still dominant through most of the 1960s. Perhaps their box office popularity was fading, but stars like Doris Day, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne were at the top of their game in 1960s classics such as Lover Come Back, Fail-Safe, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. By the latter part of the decade, the "new stars" weren't graduates of the studio system--they gained their experiences in television (e.g., Robert Redford) and independent films (e.g., Jack Nicholson). They made fewer films and often took roles in small pictures like The Passenger (with Nicholson). Thus, this hypothesis proposes that the cutoff point for "classic" status is when the majority of stars from Hollywood's "Golden Age" retired from acting--in the 1960s and 1970s.

A Film's Enduring Appeal
However, the survey results also indicate that a film's enduring appeal is significantly more important than its stars or age. When asked what criterion was most important in defining a classic film, 57% said it was the film's enduring appeal. A distant second was "when a film was made" (25%), followed by "a film's impact on culture and the industry" (12%) and and the "iconic appeal of a film's stars or director" (5%).

Of course, it's hard to discuss a film's overall appeal without focusing, in part, on the contributions of the actors in it and the film's age. We also can't forget that nostalgia--a partial by-product of age--plays a role in the "timeless" quality of some films. Thus, there's overlap between the different criteria...let's just call that a survey design flaw.

To avoid getting mired in analysis, we'll look at "enduring appeal" from a holistic viewpoint. Aside from nostalgia, why do some classic films maintain--or even increase--their appeal through the years? One potential reason is that films from the 1930s through the 1960s spanned so many genres. Lavish musicals? Check. Westerns? Hundreds were made. Gangster films, film noir, war movies, historical adventure? Yes to all!

Cabaret: A rare 1970s musical.

Yet, by the 1970s, almost all those genres were dead, on life support, or buoyed by a couple of hits. Quick, can you name a significant musical other than Cabaret or Grease from the 1970s? I suspect films like A Matter of Time, Funny Lady, and All That Jazz have their admirers, but none of them is considered a classic. How about a rousing pirate action film from the 70s? I think Scalawag and Swashbuckler are best forgotten.

Another contributing factor to enduring appeal, related to the variety of genres, is the number of films with non-contemporary settings. Simply put, historical films and Westerns--which were plentiful in the 1930s through 1950s--don't date as quickly as most contemporary-set dramas. Admittedly, I'm generalizing to a degree, because Gene Autrey's Westerns seem very dated! But Shane, Winchester '73, Dodge City? Their settings give them a timeless quality that keeps these films fresh over the years.

Finally, I suppose some classic film fans may argue that "movies were just better in the old days" and that's why their appeal has endured over the last 70 years. Personally, I don't buy that. There are fine films made every year and, in time, the definition of classic film is bound to evolve.

But for now, we'll stick with the definition provided by our survey results. What is a classic film? A movie made prior to the 1980s that possesses enduring appeal. That's short and sweet...but the supporting reasons are what make for intriguing discussion. I've listed my thoughts. What are yours?


Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we'll examine more survey results to define the prototypical classic film fan.