Alfred Hitchcock‘s 45th film has moved ahead of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic — at least according to the latest Sight & Sound poll conducted once a decade for the British Film Institute. Citizen Kane, which Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller surpassed by 34 votes out of 846 cast, is No. 2 on the list of 50 posted today (more will be posted in the weeks ahead). A decade ago Kane and Vertigo were separated by only 5
votes. Even so, Kane‘s total tally this time was three times as large as the number of votes it received last time so Welles wasn’t exactly snubbed. Out of more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles contacted for the survey, Sight & Sound received 846 Top 10 lists that among them mention 2,045 different films. The new survey also enjoyed greater participation than its six predecessors. The remaining movies in order of the BFI’s Top 10 are Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story (1953), Jean Renoir’s La Regle Du Jeu (1939) and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1939), Carl Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1927) and Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963).


Better than North By Northwest? Or Shadow of a Doubt? Or Rear Window? Uh, no. Decent movie but ruined by the awful Kim Novak. Should have waited for Vera Miles or convinced Grace Kelly to come out of retirement.
My favorite movie! I know these lists don’t matter, but nice to see.
Of course this comes at the same time the Brit Film Institute is promoting a big Hitchcock film retrospective and on the face of it an utterly nonsensical proclamation– it only succeeds in making Sight and Sound the publishers of this dubious poll look shamefully self promoting, jingoistic, and ridiculous. Vertigo is riddled with hammy dialogue, wooden acting, interminable “tailing” sequences, cliché, and woefully underdeveloped characters. It’s wonderful to watch as a nostalgic even cultural glimpse into Hitchcock’s fascination with pop psychology, but the greatest film of all time? Please!
that’s not even hitchcock’s best film
The polling for this decade’s list started 12 months ago and the S&S poll as a whole has been around for 60 years.
Any suggestion that the poll was rigged is impossible.
I would still take Citizen Kane over Vertigo any day!
However, I would have voted Murnau’s Last Laugh instead of Sunrise.
Man With A Movie Camera is one of my all time favorites!
“Vertigo” is indeed the finest American film — by anybody.
But “Citizen Kane” will always be a magnificent star in the cinema heavens.
And nobody should take any of these polls so seriously.
What a genuinely odd list of films. It’s all a matter of opinion, of course — but in my opinion these aren’t even the best films of any of the directors on this list.
odd.
CITIZEN KANE has to be over VERTIGO.
And where’s Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI? Lean’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA?
Those two also…ahead of VERTIGO.
Guess they didn’t ask HENDREN’S vote on this list, uh?
Man how do you not have classics like “The Godfather”, “Gone With The Wind”,”Raging Bull”, “One Who Flew The Cookoo’s Nest”, “The Graduate”, “Goodfellas” & “Platoon” on the list. I always knew they we’re kinda weird in the UK, but damn. No “Seven Samurai”,”Over The Waterfront”, ‘Godfather Part II”, i can go on and on about the obvious ommissions from this list. But hey, i guess everyone has different tastes.
Ridiculous. “Notorious”, “Rebecca” & of course, “North By Northwest” are infinitely better than “Vertigo”. But none of those films have the intensity, dialogue, irony or filmmaking craft that “Citizen Kane” possesses.
Obviously the BFI is trying to generate a BFD to get people talking about their silly list.
how did “ernest saves christmas” do?
Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo does rate?