Best Picture by Plot Flashcards
Sunrise
A sophisticated city woman seduces a farmer and convinces him to murder his wife and join her in the city, but he ends up rekindling his romance with his wife when he changes his mind at the last moment.
The Broadway Melody
A pair of sisters from the vaudeville circuit try to make it big time on Broadway, but matters of the heart complicate the attempt.
All Quiet on the Western Front
A German youth eagerly enters World War I, but his enthusiasm wanes as he gets a firsthand view of the horror.
Cimarron
A newspaper editor settles in an Oklahoma boom town with his reluctant wife at the end of the nineteenth century.
Grand Hotel
A group of very different individuals staying at a luxurious hotel in Berlin deal with each of their respective dramas.
Cavalcade
A portrayal of the triumphs and tragedies of two English families, the upper-crust Marryots and the working-class Bridgeses, from 1899 to 1933.
It Happened One Night
A renegade reporter trailing a young runaway heiress for a big story joins her on a bus heading from Florida to New York, and they end up stuck with each other when the bus leaves them behind at one of the stops.
The Great Ziegfeld
The ups and downs of a famed producer of extravagant stage revues, are portrayed.
The Life of Emile Zola
The biopic of the famous French muckraking writer and his involvement in fighting the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair.
You Can’t Take It with You
The son of a snobbish Wall Street banker becomes engaged to a woman from a good-natured but decidedly eccentric family, not realizing that his father is trying to force her family from their home for a real estate development.
Rebecca
A self-conscious woman juggles adjusting to her new role as an aristocrat’s wife and avoiding being intimidated by his first wife’s spectral presence.
How Green Was My Valley
At the turn of the century in a Welsh mining village, the Morgans, he stern, she gentle, raise coal-mining sons and hope their youngest will find a better life.
Mrs. Miniver
A British family struggles to survive the first months of World War II.
Casablanca
A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.
Going My Way
When young Father O’Malley arrives at St. Dominic’s, old Father Fitzgibbon doesn’t think much of the church’s newest member.
The Best Years of Our Lives
Three World War II veterans, two of them traumatized or disabled, return home to the American midwest to discover that they and their families have been irreparably changed.
Gentlemen’s Agreement
A reporter pretends to be Jewish in order to cover a story on anti-Semitism, and personally discovers the true depths of bigotry and hatred.
All the King’s Men
The rise and fall of a corrupt politician, who makes his friends richer and retains power by dint of a populist appeal.
All About Eve
A seemingly timid but secretly ruthless ingénue insinuates herself into the lives of an aging Broadway star and her circle of theater friends.
An American in Paris
Three friends struggle to find work in Paris. Things become more complicated when two of them fall in love with the same woman.
The Greatest Show on Earth
The dramatic lives of trapeze artists, a clown, and an elephant trainer are told against a background of circus spectacle.
From Here to Eternity
At a U.S. Army base in 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit’s team, while his commanding officer’s wife and top aide begin a tentative affair.
On the Waterfront
An ex-prize fighter turned New Jersey longshoreman struggles to stand up to his corrupt union bosses, including his older brother, as he starts to connect with the grieving sister of one of the syndicate’s victims.
Marty
A middle-aged butcher and a school teacher who have given up on the idea of love meet at a dance and fall for each other.
