Facts About the 400 Nominees for the Top 100 Greatest American Movies:
- All chosen films were feature-length fictional movies
produced between 1912 and 1996 "with the goal of amassing a capsule of
the first 100 years of American cinema, across decades and across genres."
Write-in votes for unlisted films were also permitted.
- The 1950s was the most represented decade on the list, with
20 films in the top 100.
- And 70 of the films on the top 100 list were from 1950 and after.
- 14
films on the top 100 list were made after 1980.
- More than half of the films (56) in the top 100 list were made
between 1950 and 1979 (a three decade period), thereby ignoring cinema's early years and some
of the modern era.
Each Decade's Summary: (Nominees and Winners):
- Silent era (1912-1929):
22 nominated films, only 3 films in the top 100, including The Birth Of A Nation (1915), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Jazz Singer (1927).
- 1930s (1930-1939):
56 nominated films, with
15 films in the top 100, including: All Quiet On The Western Front (1930), City Lights (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Duck Soup (1933), King Kong (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935), Modern Times (1936), Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Gone With The Wind (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Stagecoach (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Wuthering Heights (1939).
- 1940s (1940-1949):
61 nominated films, with 12 films in the top 100, including: Fantasia (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), It's A Wonderful Life (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and The Third Man (1949).
- Other notable nominees included: His Girl Friday (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), My Darling Clementine (1946), Notorious (1946), Out Of The Past (1947), and Red River (1948).
- 1950s (1950-1959):
61 nominated films, with 20 films in the top 100, including: All About Eve (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The African Queen (1951), An American In Paris (1951), A Place in the Sun (1951), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), High Noon (1952), Singin' In The Rain (1952), From Here to Eternity
(1953), Shane (1953), On The Waterfront (1954), Rear Window (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Giant (1956), The Searchers (1956), The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), Vertigo (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), North By Northwest (1959), and Some Like It Hot (1959).
- 1960s (1960-1969):
58 nominated films, with 18 films in the top 100, including: The Apartment (1960), Psycho (1960), West Side Story (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Manchurian Candidate
(1962), To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), Dr. Strangelove or: How I ... (1964), My Fair Lady (1964), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Sound of Music (1965), Bonnie And Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid (1969), Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969).
- 1970s (1970-1979):
54 nominated films, with 18
films in the top 100, including: M*A*S*H (1970), Patton (1970), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The French Connection
(1971), The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974), Jaws (1975), One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Network (1976), Rocky (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), Annie Hall (1977), Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977), Star Wars (1977), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979).
- 1980s (1980-1989):
58 nominated films, with 6 films in the top 100, including: Raging Bull (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Tootsie (1982), Amadeus (1984), and Platoon (1986).
- 1990s (1990-1996):
30 nominated films, with 8 films in the top 100, including: Dances With Wolves (1990), GoodFellas (1990), The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), Unforgiven (1992), Schindler's List (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Fargo (1996).
See this
site's Commentary on AFI's 100
Greatest American Movies.
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