History of Movies.

The Best Technicolor Films

The three-strip era, when color itself was the star: every feature here was shot in Technicolor's three-strip process, ranked by our composite score across 20+ authoritative lists, awards and polls.

Gone with the Wind (1939) leads with a composite score of 4.72.

  1. 1
    Gone with the Wind1939 · Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood
    4.72

    Oscar Best Picture winner 1939 · AFI 100 (2007) #6 · AFI 100 (1998) #4

  2. 2
    An American in Paris1951 · Vincente Minnelli
    3.47

    Oscar Best Picture winner 1951 · AFI 100 (1998) #68 · National Film Registry (inducted 1993)

  3. 3
    The Red Shoes1948 · Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell
    3.27

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1948 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #67 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72

  4. 4
    Singin' in the Rain1952 · Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
    3.18

    Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #10 · AFI 100 (2007) #5 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52

  5. 5
    The Wizard of Oz1939 · Victor Fleming, King Vidor
    3.03

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1939 · AFI 100 (2007) #10 · AFI 100 (1998) #6

  6. 6
    The Greatest Show on Earth1952 · Cecil B. DeMille
    3.00

    Oscar Best Picture winner 1952

  7. 7
    Shane1953 · George Stevens
    2.80

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1953 · BAFTA Best Film nominee 1954 · AFI 100 (2007) #45

  8. 8
    Romeo and Juliet1954 · Renato Castellani
    2.50

    Venice Golden Lion winner 1954 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1954 #3

  9. 9
    Henry V1944 · Laurence Olivier
    2.41

    Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1948 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1946 · BFI Top 100 British films #18

  10. 10
    Cinderella1950 · Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi
    2.23

    Berlin Golden Bear winner 1951 · National Film Registry (inducted 2018)

  11. 11
    The River1951 · Jean Renoir
    2.12

    Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1951 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1952 #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185

  12. 12
    Invitation to the Dance1956 · Gene Kelly
    2.00

    Berlin Golden Bear winner 1956

  13. 13
    The Quiet Man1952 · John Ford
    1.48

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1952 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1953 #6 · National Film Registry (inducted 2013)

  14. 14
    A Star Is Born1937 · William A. Wellman
    1.29

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1937 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1938 #5

  15. 15
    The Adventures of Robin Hood1938 · Michael Curtiz, William Keighley
    1.26

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1938 · National Film Registry (inducted 1995) · Roger Ebert's Great Movies

  16. 16
    The Yearling1946 · Clarence Brown
    1.20

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1946 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1949 #9

  17. 17
    A Matter of Life and Death1946 · Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
    1.19

    Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #78 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1950 #6 · Letterboxd Top 250 #207

  18. 18
    Black Narcissus1947 · Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell
    1.13

    Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #169 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #10 · BFI Top 100 British films #44

  19. 19
    Heaven Can Wait1943 · Ernst Lubitsch
    1.06

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1943 · Criterion Collection spine #291

  20. 20
    Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs1937 · David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Percival C. Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen
    1.02

    AFI 100 (2007) #34 · AFI 100 (1998) #49 · National Film Registry (inducted 1989)

  21. 21
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp1943 · Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
    0.96

    Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196 · BFI Top 100 British films #45 · Criterion Collection spine #173

  22. 22
    The African Queen1951 · John Huston
    0.92

    AFI 100 (1998) #17 · AFI 100 (2007) #65 · National Film Registry (inducted 1994)

  23. 23
    Blossoms in the Dust1941 · Mervyn LeRoy
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1941

  24. 24
    For Whom the Bell Tolls1942 · Sam Wood
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1943

  25. 25
    Wilson1944 · Henry King
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1944

  26. 26
    Anchors Aweigh1945 · George Sidney
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1945

  27. 27
    King Solomon's Mines1950 · Compton Bennett, Andrew Marton
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1950

  28. 28
    Quo Vadis1951 · Mervyn LeRoy
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1951

  29. 29
    Ivanhoe1952 · Richard Thorpe
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1952

  30. 30
    Moulin Rouge1952 · John Huston
    0.90

    Oscar Best Picture nominee 1952

Why three-strip Technicolor was a different kind of color

Three-strip Technicolor wasn't just "color film" — it was a whole industrial regime. The camera exposed three separate black-and-white negatives behind a beam-splitting prism, the prints were made by physically transferring dye onto blank stock, and the studio had to rent the camera, the crew and a "Technicolor color consultant" (for most of the era, Natalie Kalmus, whose name is on nearly every film on this list) from the Technicolor corporation itself. The result was a palette no other process has quite reproduced: the saturated reds of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the hallucinatory ballet of The Red Shoes, the Kansas-to-Oz cut in The Wizard of Oz that turned the switch to color into the most famous single effect in movie history.

The era is bounded almost exactly by two decades. Becky Sharp (1935) was the first three-strip feature; by the mid-1950s, single-strip Eastmancolor was cheaper and good enough, and the beam-splitter cameras were retired. Everything on this page was shot inside that window, in that process — classified against the three-strip Technicolor filmography, then ranked by our composite canon score like every list on this site. The technology thread of our movie history timeline shows where this era sits in the longer story of how movies got color, sound, widescreen and everything since.