Rotten Tomatoes Gets Punked, Citizen Kane Loses its Perfect 100 off a Fake Review
If you are a fan of movies at all, then Citizen Kane is a film you have heard of. Even if you haven’t seen it, it has embedded into our culture in many ways, in many places. Maybe you know bits about the plot and what Rosebud means, maybe you’ve just googled a reference from The Simpsons that you didn’t really get, or maybe, maybe you’ve used this gif:
Whatever the case, you have heard it heralded as a film for the ages, and you know there’s something special about it, for some reason. (The reason may be that it was produced, directed, and co-written by its star, Orson Welles, in his first feature film, and that it went far beyond the rest of American cinema in its many stylistic choices and filming techniques).
So it’s a good movie. So you’ve heard, and so it’s been said.
Got a list of great movies? Guess what’s gonna be up there? Yeah, this.
Checking Rotten Tomatoes best movies list, because you’re sick of endless scrolling? Guess what? Their top choice is Paddington 2, sitting with a pretty 100% Fresh, meaning NO critics have had anything, well, critical to say about it. So it has taken the spot just recently vacated by our boy Citizen Kane.
Hang on now, you say. Kane came out in 1941. What film critic just dropped an angsty, hipster review on this classic?
Turns out, it wasn’t a recent review at all.
Turns out, it wasn’t a real review either.
The Marvelous Mae Tinee
A staffer at Rotten Tomatoes (review curation manager Tim Ryan) was recently scouring old copies of the Chicago Tribune, uploading those reviews to the site and adjusting the scores of several old films in the process, none more notable than Kane.
Here’s a snippet of what Ms. Tinee had to say:
As I read this, I giggled to myself. “This sounds like it was written by a grandma who just doesn’t get it,” I thought. It’s so silly, it can’t be true.
And it turns out, it’s not.
With all the Twitterverse abuzz about Citizen Kane losing its hundo, it was only a matter of time before an authoritative source stepped in (to be almost completely ignored). That source was, go figure, from the source of the original scathing review- Michael Phillips, the current film critic at the Chicago Tribune.
And he laid the cards on the table in no small way, writing a column with this zinger of a headline:
Rotten Tomatoes downgrades ‘Citizen Kane’ to a 99; critic responsible missing, presumed nonexistent
No criticism for the critic, but I’ll take my headline over this.
In any case, the column wastes no time revealing that Mae Tinee - a “good-try pun on matinee” - was a pseudonym used by multiple writers over the course of many decades (my research shows Mae reviewing from 1916 to 1962).
The original owner of the nom de plume was Frances Peck Kerner, but other women to take the name included Anna Nangle and Maurine Dallas Watkins, who wrote the play that was adapted into the musical "Chicago." And no matter who was at the helm, Mae was a force to be reckoned with, known for a “snappy, idiomatic writing style that could be controversial.”
And here’s the thing, a quick search for “Mae Tinee” has turned up plenty. This wasn’t a buried secret. The Tribune had even mentioned it in an article from 2013, after the death of Roger Ebert, so that isn’t ancient history.
But hey, let’s get to the fun. We here at Review Party Dot Com love our “Great Reviews in History” segment, but we also love our “Me, You, and Meme Reviews",” in which the multitudes leave whimsical reviews that do little to inform the buyer, but lots to entertain them. Mae bring us a little bit of both, so with that in mind, here is a selection of Mae Tinee doozies.
Mae Tinee, we tips our caps and dip our pens, that we may write as sharply as you.
As of this writing, Mae’s reviews are still viewed as legitimate by Rotten Tomatoes. More newspapers have reported on Citizen Kane losing the 100% than have reported on the falsity of the review. These are the times we live in, when headlines sell, and accuracy be damned. Eh, maybe Mae would be proud.
