'Kane' loses perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.

[atcolomb]

Thanks to a 80 year old negative movie review that was recently unearthed by Rotten Tomatoes as part of the site's Archival Project made Citizen Kane lose it's 100% "fresh" score. The negative review ran in the Chicago Tribune days after the film came out in theaters.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... toes-score

[Terry]

The Chicago Tribune at the time was a right-wing paper owned by Robert McCormick, one of the inspirations for the Kane character. A 'fake review' to go along with the 'fake news' that shows up in politicized news media?

[atcolomb]

Did the Hearst newspapers have negative reviews of Kane or did they just ignored the film?

[Roger Ryan]

I posted this in a different thread this morning, but it really belongs here...

Another little mystery has cropped up related to the recent "demotion" of Kane from a "100% Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes:

The review sited in the story from 1941 notes that the "... no relation to real events or persons living or dead..." disclaimer is conspicuously absent from the film. This is something I had never considered before. While I've seen the disclaimer on numerous older films dating back to the 30s, how prevalent was the use of it through the first few decades of feature production? Was it's absence from Kane a deliberate cheeky omission due to the Hearst issue?

[NoFake]

Here's what Wiki has to say:

Origins
The disclaimer came as a result of litigation against the 1932 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film Rasputin and the Empress, which insinuated that the character Princess Natasha had been raped by Russian mystic Rasputin. The character of Natasha was supposedly intended to represent Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia, who sued MGM for libel. After seeing the film twice, the jury agreed that the princess had been defamed.[1][2] Irina and her husband Felix Yusupov were reportedly awarded $127,373 (equivalent to $2,434,000 in 2019) in damages by the English Court of Appeal in 1934, and $1,000,000 (equivalent to $19,000,000 in 2019) in an out-of-court settlement with MGM.[1][2] As a preventive measure against further lawsuits, the film was taken out of distribution for decades.[2]

The film began with a claim that "This concerns the destruction of an empire … A few of the characters are still alive—the rest met death by violence." Reportedly, a judge in the case told MGM that not only was this claim damaging to their case, but that their case would be stronger if they had incorporated a directly opposite statement, that the film was not intended as an accurate portrayal of real people or events.[3] Prompted by the outcome of this case, many studios began to incorporate an "all persons fictitious" disclaimer in their films, to protect themselves from similar court action.

[Roger Ryan]

Thanks for posting that bit of history. With all the concern about Hearst, I'm surprised RKO did not insist on using the disclaimer (during the end credits, of course, as Welles would have never allowed it at the beginning of the film).

[NoFake]

My pleasure.

Excellent question -- and one which I'm surprised hasn't been raised before, if indeed it hasn't. Even if Welles enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game, you have to wonder that the studio wasn't more focused on its potential susceptibility to legal action. Film studios have never been shy about protecting their bottom line.

And yet: maybe RKO knew that Hearst wouldn't want the additional publicity a suit would have brought to the film, and the additional attention to and questions about his own life it would have raised. What they seem not to have realized is that he would be able to achieve much of the result he wanted by virtually killing advertising for the film, turning the threat of bad publicity for him into a paucity of publicity for RKO and Welles.

[Wellesnet]

Aggregator Rotten Tomatoes recently dug up an obscure bad notice of Citizen Kane from 1941, which served to spoil its 100% perfect reviews score there — timed, no doubt, by the website to capitalize on interest in the movie’s 80th anniversary on May 1. On the bright side, the manufactured controversy by RT gives us an excuse to look back and celebrate the many favorable notices that greeted Orson Welles’ first Hollywood film upon its release.
https://www.wellesnet.com/reviews-citizen-kane-80/

[Terry]

Paddington 2 loses perfect score after negative review.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 234960772/

[Steve Paradis]

The Mark of Zorro is down to 93% since they found a Spanish review from 1941 complaining that the Douglas Fairbanks one from 1920 is better.
I think they're just trolling.

[Le Chiffre]

Well, let's see how PADDINGTON 2 does in the Sight and Sound poll next year.