Best Picture 1917

by popegrutch

Once again we come to the final award, the best picture for the year 1917. This year, since I got some of the Century Awards up early, I’m able to post before the actual Academy Awards have started, so there’s plenty of time for all of you to get to your Oscars Parties. Drink some champagne for me, and for the winners of a century ago!

The candidates this year have mostly been up for, and many cases won, other awards. Taken together, they make a good list of the best movies you can see from 1917 if you’re ever looking for one. In the course of all of the other awards, I’ve pretty much said everything I have to say about them, so let’s just get on with the award!

The nominees for best picture for 1917 are:

  1. The Dying Swan
  2. A Man There Was
  3. Poor Little Rich Girl
  4. Little Princess
  5. Easy Street
  6. The Immigrant
  7. Fear
  8. A Modern Musketeer

And the winner is…”A Man There Was!”

Once again, not an easy choice, but this was to my mind the most “modern” and successful of the movies I saw in the last year. Victor Sjöström had been on the scene for years now, and he would go on to a career that includes some of the most important movies of the twenties, and he really demonstrated with this movie that Sweden was on the map so far as the film industry was concerned. He took a poem by one of Sweden’s favorite sons, Henrik Ibsen, and turned it into a masterful example of the cinematic art. This movie was largely his effort, and with this, it now takes home three Century Awards, showing it to be a classic in the true sense of the word.