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Best Black and white Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of black and white cinema — measured across 13,735 indexed frames from 214 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Black and white films over-index on fedora, hat and coat — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    The 39 Steps (1935)

    Alfred HitchcockDP Bernard KnowlesIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Richard Hannay is a Canadian visitor to London. At the end of "Mr Memory"'s show in a music hall, he meets Annabella Smith, who is running away from secret agents. He agrees to hide her in his flat, but she is murdered during the night. Fearing that he could be accused of the murder, Hannay goes on the run to break the spy ring.

  2. 2

    The Stranger (1946)

    Orson WellesDP Russell MettyIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Wilson of the War Crimes Commission is seeking Franz Kindler, mastermind of the Holocaust, who has effectively erased his identity. Wilson releases Kindler's former comrade Meinike and follows him to Harper, Connecticut, where he is killed before he can identify Kindler. Now Wilson's only clue is Kindler's fascination with antique clocks; but, though Kindler seems secure in his new identity, he feels his past closing in.

  3. 3

    Ikiru (1952)

    Akira KurosawaDP Asakazu NakaiIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Kanji Watanabe is a civil servant. He has worked in the same department for 30 years. His life is pretty boring and monotonous, though he once used to have passion and drive. Then one day he discovers that he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live. After the initial depression he sets about living for the first time in over 20 years. Then he realises that his limited time left is not just for living life to the full but to leave something meaningful behind...

  4. 4

    The Maltese Falcon (1941)

    John HustonDP Arthur EdesonIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. That's for Sam Spade and Miles Archer. The two men are partners, but Sam doesn't like Miles much. A knockout, who goes by the name of Miss Wonderly, walks into their office; and by that night everything's changed. Miles is dead. And so is a man named Floyd Thursby. It seems Miss Wonderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There's Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There's Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility. Her only hope of protection comes from Sam, who is suspected by the police of one or the other murder. More murders are yet to come, and it will all be because of these dangerous men -- and their lust for a statuette of a bird: the Maltese Falcon.

  5. 5

    The Thin Man (1934)

    W.S. Van DykeDP James Wong HoweIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    After a four year absence, one time detective Nick Charles returns to New York with his new wife Nora and their dog, Asta. Nick re-connects with many of his old cronies, several of whom are eccentric characters, to say the least. He's also approached by Dorothy Wynant whose inventor father Clyde Wynant is suspected of murdering her father's mistress (his former secretary ).. Her father had left on a planned trip some months before and she has had no contact with him. Nick isn't all that keen on resuming his former profession but egged-on by wife Nora, who thinks this all very exciting, he agrees to help out. He solves the case, announcing the identity of the killer at a dinner party for all of the suspects.

  6. 6

    It Happened One Night (1934)

    Frank CapraDP Joseph WalkerIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Ellie Andrews has just tied the knot with society aviator King Westley when she is whisked away to her father's yacht and out of King's clutches. Ellie jumps ship and eventually winds up on a bus headed back to her husband. Reluctantly she must accept the help of out-of- work reporter Peter Warne. Actually, Warne doesn't give her any choice: either she sticks with him until he gets her back to her husband, or he'll blow the whistle on Ellie to her father. Either way, Peter gets what (he thinks!) he wants .... a really juicy newspaper story.

  7. 7

    Touch of Evil (1958)

    Orson WellesDP Russell MettyIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Mexican Narcotics officer Ramon Miguel 'Mike' Vargas has to interrupt his honeymoon on the Mexican-US border when an American building contractor is killed after someone places a bomb in his car. He's killed on the US side of the border but it's clear that the bomb was planted on the Mexican side. As a result, Vargas delays his return to Mexico City where he has been mounting a case against the Grandi family crime and narcotics syndicate. Police Captain Hank Quinlan is in charge on the US side and he soon has a suspect, a Mexican named Manolo Sanchez. Vargas is soon onto Quinlan and his Sergeant, Pete Menzies, when he catches them planting evidence to convict Sanchez. With his new American wife, Susie, safely tucked away in a hotel on the US side of the border - or so he thinks - he starts to review Quinlan's earlier cases. While concentrating on the corrupt policeman however, the Grandis have their own plans for Vargas and they start with his wife Susie.

  8. 8

    Double Indemnity (1944)

    Billy WilderDP John F. SeitzIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    In 1938, Walter Neff, an experienced salesman of the Pacific All Risk Insurance Co., meets the seductive wife of one of his clients, Phyllis Dietrichson, and they have an affair. Phyllis proposes to kill her husband to receive the proceeds of an accident insurance policy and Walter devises a scheme to receive twice the amount based on a double indemnity clause. When Mr. Dietrichson is found dead on a train track, the police accept the determination of accidental death. However, the insurance analyst and Walter's best friend Barton Keyes does not buy the story and suspects that Phyllis has murdered her husband with the help of another man.

  9. 9

    Out of the Past (1947)

    Jacques TourneurDP Nicholas MusuracaIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Jeff Bailey, small-town gas pumper, has his mysterious past catch up with him one day when he's ordered to meet with gambler Whit Sterling. En route to the meeting, he tells girlfriend Ann his story. Flashback: Once, Jeff was a private eye hired by Sterling to find his mistress Kathie who shot Whit and absconded with $40,000. He traces her to Acapulco, where the delectable Kathie makes Jeff forget all about Sterling. Back in the present, Whit's new job for Jeff is clearly a trap, but Jeff's precautions only leave him more tightly enmeshed.

  10. 10

    The Invisible Man (1933) (1933)

    James WhaleDP Arthur EdesonIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    A mysterious man, whose head is completely covered in bandages, wants a room. The proprietors of the pub aren't used to making their house an inn during the winter months, but the man insists. They soon come to regret their decision. The man quickly runs out of money, and he has a violent temper besides. Worse still, he seems to be some kind of chemist and has filled his room with messy chemicals, test tubes, beakers and the like. When they try to throw him out, they make a ghastly discovery. Meanwhile, Flora Cranley appeals to her father to do something about the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Griffin, his assistant and her sweetheart. Her father's other assistant, the cowardly Dr. Kemp, is no help. He wants her for himself. Little does Flora guess that the wild tales, from newspapers and radio broadcasts, of an invisible homicidal maniac are stories of Dr. Griffin himself, who has discovered the secret of invisibility and gone mad in the process.

What black and white films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a black and white frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — fedora is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • fedora3.7×
  • hat3.1×
  • coat2.7×
  • necktie2.4×
  • trench coat2.2×
  • suit jacket2.2×
  • suit2.1×
  • shadow1.8×

How black and white films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate black and white from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 14%chiaroscurovs 2% baseline
  • 32%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 83%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Ugetsu (1953) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 13,735 frames from 214 films carrying the black and white label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/black-and-white

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used