The cinephiles, whose natural state is outrage, were up in arms the other week when Citizen Kane lost its perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.
or those of you who do not know, Rotten Tomatoes is a website that collects and aggregates film reviews to give movies a subsequent rating.
This ranges from Certified Fresh (really good) to Fresh (grand) to Rotten (not worth the price of entry).
Its commendably democratic purpose is to give the public a handy tool to assess the merits of various new films competing for their attention, but as you can imagine, it’s not exactly beloved by film-makers — and ever since its inception in the late 1990s, actors, directors, producers and screenwriters have been quietly wishing it ill.
Still, you’d expect Kane, by common consensus one of the greatest movies ever made, to have a spick-and-span 100% Certified Fresh rating. And until very recently, it did.
Then, during an archive project at Rotten Tomatoes, a forgotten review of Citizen Kane from 1941 was unearthed. Published in the Chicago Tribune and written by one Mae Tinee, the clumsy pseudonym of some in-house hack perhaps (matinee — get it?), the piece politely demurred from the wave of contemporary acclaim Orson Welles’ film was enjoying.
Under the self-explanatory headline "Citizen Kane fails to impress as greatest film ever made”, the writer set out his or her critical stall. “It’s interesting, it’s different. In fact, it’s bizarre enough to become a museum piece. But its sacrifice of simplicity to eccentricity robs it of distinction and general entertainment value."
The reviewer also had a bone to pick with the film’s vaunted noirish photography: “I only know it gives one the creeps and that I kept wishing they’d let a little sunshine in”. It was too “shadowy and spooky” for this critic’s taste.
That rather unconvincing argument, written 80 years ago, was enough to ruin Kane’s 100% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, casting it into the outer darkness occupied by only fairly brilliant films.
To add insult to injury, it was widely reported that Paddington 2 had replaced it as the No 1 film on the site — incorrectly, as it turned out, but the damage had been done. Should we care?
I should point out that Rotten Tomatoes uses my reviews, and occasionally asks for clarification when the content of a review appears to contradict its star rating.
And as a concept, you’d have to say, Rotten Tomatoes appears to be perfectly sensible: but its ratings are predicated on the idea that all reviews are cogent, and rational, an assumption which, sadly, is quite a reach, especially in this day and age.
In theory, the family cat could become a film critic: all the qualifications you need are a love of cinema, an understanding of genre and of film-making generally, and some knowledge of film history that will distinguish you from the average pub bore and give your opinions context.
Okay some of that might be beyond the cat, but ought to be easy enough for anyone who’s watched a lot of films. But a lot of modern critics, online and elsewhere, have frames of references that reach back no further than 1980 (if you’re lucky), and tend to form partisan cliques around genres and franchises they love. Woe betide anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
On Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the "100 Greatest Movies of All Time”, for instance, there are no fewer than nine superhero movies, most of them by Marvel. There are six Pixar animations, two Star Wars (only the recent ones of course) and two Mission: Impossibles. Actually Mission: Impossible — Fallout is fourth on the list of all-time greats!
To get on that Greatest Movies list, a film needs more than 40 reviews, which hopelessly skews it in favour of the present.
There are lots of fine films on there, no question, but ought the likes of Baby Driver, How to Train Your Dragon, Brooklyn, Shawn the Sheep Movie and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri be there?
Sanity prevails, to some extent, on Rotten Tomatoes’ wall of praise with no dissenting voices that is the roll call of movies with a 100% fresh critical rating. Here you will find some of the usual suspects that tend to appear on lists of great films: Les 400 Coups, Battleship Potemkin, The Maltese Falcon, Rome: Open City, Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story. Also, Paddington 2.
But beyond that zone of excellence lie many of the great gems of cinema, like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (98% fresh), Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (96%), Antonioni’s l’Avventura (94%), Buster Keaton’s The General (93%), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (93%) or Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (96%), all demonstrably superior films to, say, Howard Hawks’ endearing but trite western Rio Bravo, which somehow retains a 100% rating.
Still, no system is perfect, I do like the fact that Rotten Tomatoes has an audience score for movies as well as critical ones, and I note with pleasure that my favourite comedy of all, Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert, is a proud member of the 100 club.
Pondering the merits of Rotten Tomatoes as a culturally viable proposition raises the whole question of whether or not we need critics at all. And in the broadest sense of course, we do not.
You will notice that film critics were not among those first in line to be inoculated against Covid-19: we are not exactly frontline workers and our social usefulness is peripheral at best.
Our purpose? To entertain primarily, something some of our more earnest colleagues might do well to remember, but also to assess the quality of new cinema, and advise readers on what movies might be worth spending their hard-earned cash on.
If cinemagoers read a reviewer on a regular basis, and finds that their tastes broadly align, this arrangement can save everyone a lot of time and money. And there are also, of course, the cheap jokes, which most critics supply free gratis, often amusing only themselves.
But back to Kane. Mae Tinee, bashing out a review in deepest 1941, might have been sick and tired of all the noise about Orson Welles, a smooth-talking blowhard from back east who’d made his name in a Harlem theatre and knew nothing whatsoever about cinema (Kane was his first film).
Nothing gets a critic’s goat more than being obliged to love something: if you hear one too many people tell you how marvellous a film is, it’s human nature to sit back and say, “oh yeah?”.
Perhaps "Mae” had been swayed by the furious propaganda campaign of billionaire Press baron William Randolph Hearst, who felt that Kane was a thinly veiled and deeply unflattering portrait of himself and ordered his media running dogs to sabotage it. Or maybe "Mae” just didn’t like the film.
This, of course, is every critic’s right, provided you can back it up with plausible argument. And while it might be possible to construct a case for the prosecution along the lines that Citizen Kane is a bit showy, po-faced and pleased with itself, Mae Tinee’s justifications for an underwhelmed review seem shaky at best.
In his or her review, Welles’ and his cinematographer Gregg Toland’s extraordinary cinematic innovations are reduced to “eccentricity”. And as for the famous low lighting and shadows that helped inspire the noir craze, well all of that gave Mae “the creeps”.
A lot of those visual effects were inspired by Welles’ work with the Mercury Theatre, but if he had “let the sunshine” in as our friend at the Chicago Tribune advised, Citizen Kane might now be forgotten.
Possible clues for Mae Tinee’s rather begrudging review appear in its introduction. “You’ve heard a lot about this picture,” the reviewer begins huffily, “and I see by the ads that some experts think it ‘the greatest movie ever made’. I don’t.” A cry for attention, perhaps? Posthumously, the ploy has worked.
In any case, "Mae” need not have worried: the great and good of Hollywood were so incensed by Orson’s insouciant brilliance that they hounded and sabotaged all future projects and eventually succeeded in driving him out altogether.
He would spend the latter portion of his life as an artistic vagabond, acting in dodgy films in order to raise enough money to fund his own.
Of course it is perfectly acceptable not to like Kane, but if you’re going to announce that it’s not a great film, you’d better have all your ducks in a row first.
There are plenty of online experts who think Welles’ film is the “most overrated movie of all time”, but it’s been at or near the top of critics polls of great films for many decades, in spite of the fact that it was made 80 years ago, in black and white, in a manner and acting style that could easily seem outdated. This is surely no coincidence.
But you don’t need me, or Rotten Tomatoes or anyone else, to tell you whether Citizen Kane is a great film or not.
The trick is to watch it and make your mind up yourself.
