1939 vs 1975: Which was the greatest year in cinema ever?

Telegraph

2 days ago

Which was the greatest year in cinema ever? Not so long ago, the answer was obvious – the films of 1939 used to rule the world. Wistful critics and tweedy academics waxed lyrical about their unrivalled artistry. Grandparents paused their afternoons when they caught Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach or The Wizard of Oz on TV, resuming them only once the credits rolled.
And then, somewhere down the line, those films disappeared. Millennials consider them unbearably antiquated and irrelevant; Gen Z thinks that Greta Garbo is an exciting young winger who plays for Real Madrid and John Wayne is probably a friend of their dad's.
The right-on film studies crowd savaged these pictures for their racism, sentimentality and deference to authority. They have a new cinematic annus mirabilis: 1975.
That was the year of Jaws, the first modern blockbuster, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which reinvented comedy. It was when Dog Day Afternoon and Nashville tore open the range of stories that Hollywood drama could depict, and the iconoclastic One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest won the Best Picture Oscar.
The musical came back from the dead too, madder than ever, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Who's Tommy. And cinema-goers could also find Barry Lyndon, Young Frankenstein, 3 Days of the Condor, and umpteen foreign-language masterpieces on the big screen.
No wonder cinephiles adore it. In 2022, Sight and Sound magazine named 1975's brilliant but obscure drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film ever made, and last month ran a special issue on the movies released that year.
On the face of it, they do seem more attuned to our cynical and irreverent age. The rebellious baby boomers who made them are now our cultural elders – the leader of Python's Knights Who Say 'Ni!' now really is Sir Michael Palin – and the world has followed their example in distrusting (and lampooning) authority. We still respond to the anti-establishment bite of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and relate to the alienated outsiders and weirdos in Python or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Yet the largely forgotten films of 1939 have aged much better than we think. Their endearing innocence and solidity, once dismissed as naive, is a surprising relief from modern anxieties. And they're still remarkably entertaining, almost a century after they were made.
So which year is the best in cinema history? I've put their greatest films head-to-head across different categories below, and you can vote for your winners in our polls.
Meanwhile, if you think that there are other golden years in cinema history beyond the two I've chosen, then you can make your case in the comments section. We'll pull out the best of your responses.
One-word thrillers
Stagecoach vs Jaws