AFI Top 100 Films Facts and Trivia

Recently, they had a Final Jeopardy question and the category title was “The AFI’s 100 Greatest Films” when a much better title would have been just “1940s Film Favorites”. (If you look on IMDB’s list of most popular 1940s films, the answer is actually No. 1.) The clue’s reference to the AFI Top 100 films was that it was “one of the top 20” — not very helpful unless you memorized the Top 20 or 25 movies on that list, or knew that there is only one 1946 movie (they gave the exact year) in the AFI Top 20.

The part of the clue that was supposed to point the players to the answer said it “was based on a short story published as ‘The Man Who Was Never Born'”. Well, you can see in the game recap that none of the players were able to get it based on that and one commenter even thought the trivia so obscure that the cluewriters should be ashamed.

The AFI Top 100 film list was updated in 2007 and a bunch of movies were taken off and new ones added. “Citizen Kane” is still No. 1 but “Casablanca” and “The Godfather” have switched places. Here are the before and after Top 10:

	2007	1998
1	Citizen Kane — 1941	Citizen Kane — 1941
2	The Godfather — 1972	Casablanca — 1942
3	Casablanca — 1942	The Godfather — 1972
4	Raging Bull — 1980	Gone With The Wind — 1939
5	Singin’ In The Rain — 1952	Lawrence Of Arabia — 1962
6	Gone With The Wind — 1939	The Wizard Of Oz — 1939
7	Lawrence Of Arabia — 1962	The Graduate — 1967
8	Schindler’s List — 1993	On the Waterfront — 1954
9	Vertigo — 1958	Schindler’s List — 1993
10	The Wizard Of Oz — 1939	Singin’ In The Rain — 1952

AFI has a pdf list with built-in comparisons of the changes you can print out and you can even check off all the ones you’ve seen. Since a number of films were removed from the Top 100 in 2007, some of the facts pertaining to the 1998 list have changed.

The films now span from 1916 to 2001. (The silent film “Intolerance” at No. 49 to “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” at No. 50).

1939 no longer has the most films because “Wuthering Heights” and “Stagecoach” were taken off the list but it still has two films in the Top 10.

Jimmy Stewart still has 5 movies in the 2007 Top 100, but “Vertigo” was promoted to the Top 10. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was demoted from No. 11 to No. 20; “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) is No. 26; Rear Window (1954) is No. 48; and “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) is No. 44.

Robert De Niro still has 5 films in the top 100. “Raging Bull” shot all the way up to No. 4; “The Godfather, Part II” (1974) is No. 32; Taxi Driver (1976) is No. 52; The Deer Hunter (1978) is No. 53); and Goodfellas (1990) is No. 92.

Harrison Ford now has 5 films as well with the addition of “All the President’s Men”; however, he was not a lead actor in that or in “American Graffiti”.

With the removal of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, Katharine Hepburn only has 4 films in the Top 100, putting her in a tie with with Diane Keaton and Faye Dunaway.

The removal of “Giant” and “Rebel Without a Cause” left James Dean totally unrepresented on the list and dropped the number of Natalie Wood films to 2.

Here are the movies that were removed from the 1998 Top 100 in 2007:

1915 — The Birth of a Nation

1927 — The Jazz Singer

1930 — All Quiet on the Western Front

1931 — Frankenstein

1935 — Mutiny on the Bounty

1939 — Stagecoach

1939 — Wuthering Heights

1940 — Fantasia

1949 — The Third Man

1951 — A Place in the Sun

1951 — An American in Paris