Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” Place No. 1 and No. 2 in ‘Best of the 1950’s Movie Poll at WitD

by Sam Juliano

An Alfred Hitchcock ‘lovefest’ was announced this week by Voting Tabulator Extraordinaire Angelo A. D’Arminio Jr. after he sorted the ballots at the conclusion of the seven-week voting duration at the blogsite Wonders in the Dark, in which voters were asked to name in numerical order their 25 favorite films from 1950 to 1959.  37 people cast ballots, a number of whom run their own film sites.  Rear Window (1954), a classic drama starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly which examines voyeurism, and is all but shot in a single room, finished first in this cinematically rich decade, with a total of 465 points, edging out another Hitchcock masterpiece, Vertigo, which finished with 435 points.  Vertigo, which is often cited as one of the greatest films of all-time in polls run by Sight and Sound and other publications, is an eerily beautiful study on the destructive power of romantic illusion that again stars James Stewart as a retired police officer, suffering from vertigo.  The female leads are played by Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes.  According to D’Arminio, Rear Window took the lead after the first few ballots were cast, and the film masterpiece never looked back.  Vertigo was engaged in a spirited challenge from the musical masterwork Singin in the Rain, which settled in at Number 3, while John Ford’s western landmark The Searchers and Billy Wilder’s cynical study of decadence Sunset Boulevard rounded out the top 5.     

Four foreign-language films mounted strong challenges to the top 5, and finished from Nos. 6 to 9:  Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff, Yashujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Max Ophuls’s Earrings of Madame de.  Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, rounded out the top 10.  The Top 50 films of the decade are as follows with point totals:  

1   465     REAR WINDOW (HITCHCOCK)

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