Rotten Tomatoes downgrades ‘Citizen Kane’ to a 99; critic responsible missing, presumed nonexistent

Tough week for “Citizen Kane!” Let’s hope its reputation can survive it.

On Sunday’s lowest-rated Academy Awards ceremony ever, “Mank” — director David Fincher’s Netflix project about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the primary textual author of director, star and credited co-writer Orson Welles’s 1941 debut feature — won two Oscars. That’s double the number “Citizen Kane” won. (Mankiewicz and Welles shared the original screenplay award.)

Then, on Tuesday, word got out about a cruel but honest adjustment made early last month to the hallowed 100% ”fresh” score attached to “Citizen Kane” on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.

On the site, review curation manager Tim Ryan recently posted a slew of old Chicago Tribune reviews, from both the silent and the sound film era, written pseudonymously under the gallingly adorable byline Mae Tinee, a good-try pun on “matinee.”

Various writers, including onetime Tribune reporter and future “Chicago” playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins, filed reviews under the Mae Tinee byline between 1915 and 1966, thereby marginalizing, trivializing and infantilizing the World’s Greatest Newspaper’s film coverage for a half-century or so. This goes to show that some journalistic traditions are dumber than others.

The Tribune’s 1941 verdict on “Citizen Kane”? “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.”

In other words, in the eyes of Rotten Tomatoes: rotten! And now, what was once a 100% “fresh” rating has been busted down to the realm of mere mortals: a crummy little 99.

In fairness to the Tribune’s longtime fake critic: Ms. Tinee wasn’t the only contemporaneous reviewer who found “Citizen Kane” forbidding or odd, or not heartwarming (as if the film were even trying). In The New Republic, critic Otis Ferguson allowed that Welles’ achievement was “very exciting to anyone who gets excited about how things can be done in the movies,” and that “there is no doubt the picture is dramatic. But what goes on between the dramatic high points, the story?” Ferguson was not persuaded.

“Talk and more talk,” he wrote. “And while the stage may stand for this, the movies don’t.”

In truth, plenty of the 1941 “Citizen Kane” reviews posted on the RT site could plausibly end up in the “rotten” camp, not the “fresh.” There is no RT category for a mixed review, which is weird because the majority of all movies are neither fresh nor rotten.

“Citizen Kane” must live, for now, with a 99. Meantime, Film Twitter can get back to its latest assertions about why it never all that great in the first place.

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