Best of the Year is an article carried in the first issue of each year of the British Film Institute magazine Sight and Sound. For this article, the magazine asks various well-known people what films they had most enjoyed the previous year, "not necessarily new films, but ones they had seen for the first time."
For the Jan-Mar 1952 issue (Vol. 21 New Quarterly Series No. 3), the following 13 people were asked:
- Agatha Christie
- Ruby M. Ayres - novelist
- Cecil Beaton - photographer, stage and costume designer
- Benjamin Britten - poet
- T. E. B. Clarke - screenwriter
- C. Day Lewis - poet, novelist
- John Gielgud - actor
- Trevor Howard - actor
- Celia Johnson - actress
- Michael Powell - film maker
- Ronald Searle - artist
- Peter Ustinov - actor
- Mai Zetterling - film director
Agatha Christie's choices for films which she enjoyed most were:
- The Lavender Hill Mob - comedy starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway about two men who plan to sInterteal gold bars from the bank of England. Christie described this as "Excellent- Good acting, original plot, and very amusing".
- No Highway in the Sky - based on Nevil Shute's novel No Highway, an aviation drama starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich about an aeronautical engineer who predicts that a new aircraft design would suffer structural failure after a certain number of hours but nobody believes him. Christie thought this was "Very good and gripping".
- Seven Days to Noon - A scientist threatens to detonate a bomb in London and Scotland Yard has seven days to find it. Joan Hickson appeared in this film. According to Christie: "Quite good thriller--nice shots of London".
- A delightful film about Seals--"ungratefully can't now remember the name of it" - According to J. C. Bernthal[1] this is most likely Disney's Seal Island, the first of a series of nature documentaries.
References[]
- ↑ J. C. Bernthal, Agatha Christie: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022), 181, ebook edition.