The 10 Humphrey Bogart Movies With A 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

Few movie stars compare to Humphrey Bogart. The tough-as-nails actor embodied the very idea of American film noir in the 1940s and 1950s, having made 16 noir films in his lifetime and proved himself to be just as adept at playing snarling villains as he was at playing a heroic, star-crossed lover. You may know him best as Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon" or Rick in "Casablanca," but if you know Bogart's full history, you know that he transitioned away from playing nastier characters to more classically "good guys" over time. If you're not quite ready to dive into his full career, it's not hard to blame you; although he died relatively young, at age 57, he appeared in 75 films across a few decades. So, you might ask yourself, where to start?

Certainly an easy way to start is by checking Bogart's page on Rotten Tomatoes. As ever, it's worth reminding yourself that the site should be taken with a grain of salt at all times, but most specifically with new films, since there are so many reviews being aggregated, and because the site doesn't discriminate between the mildly positive and the passionately positive reviews (and the same for negative reviews). However, seeing as Bogart's work wouldn't merit quite so many reviews, his best work should be easy to spot there, right? Well, yes and no. Among those 75 films, a whopping 10 of them have perfect scores on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, films such as "Casablanca," "The Maltese Falcon," and "The African Queen" are not among those 10 films.

Now, let's not get too worked up. First, the scores for those three films of Bogart's, among his very best and among the very best American films ever made, are very high indeed. "Casablanca" has a 99, as does "The Maltese Falcon," while "The African Queen" has a 96. Now, while those scores are quite high, they're not 100, so yes, each film did net at least one negative review on the site. While none of these are new releases, it's also worth noting that each of them has quite a few reviews: "Casablanca" has a surprisingly high 135 reviews, "The Maltese Falcon" has 110, and "The African Queen" has just 53. Of those, the latter film pulled in two negative reviews, and for what it's worth, both of those were contemporary to the film's release in the early 1950s. (One of the two reviews came straight from the widely respected Sight & Sound magazine.) 

For both "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon," it's just one review each that stopped these classics from having a perfect score. "The Maltese Falcon" has one unnamed negative review from someone writing for the Sydney Morning Herald in November of 1942 (although they do note that John Huston's directorial debut is "promising," which ... yes, that's true). Who would dare give a negative review to "Casablanca"? Well, there's the short answer and the frustrating one. Short answer? Someone named Martin Scribbs from an outlet called Low IQ Canadian. His review of the film boils down to one word: "Overblown". The link on the site leads to a dead website, and there's no other evidence of Scribbs' writing on the film online, which raises a number of questions as much towards this person (presuming he is a real person) as to the big tomato itself. If a review doesn't exist outside of a single word on an aggregation website, does it really exist? (And also, why would Rotten Tomatoes keep such dead links on their site, especially when it relates to an undeniable classic?) But, you may be thinking, if these stone-cold favorites don't have a 100 percent, what films of Bogart's do?

Of the 10 Bogart films with a perfect score, the first of note is another unquestionably brilliant film, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Bogart plays Fred C. Dobbs, a hardscrabble would-be gold miner with an intensely paranoid streak that only gets worse when he and a couple of others (Tim Holt and Walter Huston) stumble upon a serious find of gold in Mexico. First and foremost, if you only know Bogart from his more romantic noir efforts, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" will be an eye-opening and searing affair for you (as challenging, maybe, as it was for the actors to make the movie), because it shows how committed Bogart could be to playing truly heinous characters. It's the type of role that's so seminal it inspired Paul Thomas Anderson in the creation of his neo-Western epic "There Will Be Blood," and not just because star Daniel Day-Lewis was doing a riff on the voice of the director of "Sierra Madre," John Huston.

Aside from that epic, six of the other nine Bogart films with a 100% all were released in the mid-1930s (before the days of Bogart playing Sam Spade and the like). "The Petrified Forest," "Black Legion," "Angels with Dirty Faces," "The Roaring Twenties," "Marked Woman," and "Kid Galahad" all have perfect scores, even if not all of those films are as well-known as the others mentioned here so far. Two of the remaining three titles were released in the 1950s: "The Barefoot Contessa" and "The Harder They Fall." That leaves one more title, arriving in 1942, the same year as "Casablanca" — a film called "All Through the Night." (That movie does feature a great Bogart character name: Alfred "Gloves" Donahue.) If you know some of Bogart's biggest films, you may feel surprised that these titles, even "Angels with Dirty Faces," a gangster film starring James Cagney, got a perfect score. Of the ten, the most impressive is "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," because it has 55 reviews, all of which are categorized Fresh. But the other titles? Well, "Kid Galahad" does have a perfect score but with just six reviews. "Marked Woman," which pairs Bogart with Bette Davis, has just five reviews. Even the later-era "The Barefoot Contessa," in which Bogart co-stars with Ava Gardner, has just 12 reviews on the site. So yes, these movies do have a 100 percent, but there are exceedingly few reviews to select from.

This is the balance you sometimes have to strike with Rotten Tomatoes. It's wonderful that the site keeps track of the countless films from stars of every era of cinema, and hopefully you take inspiration here to watch something that isn't just an obvious title of Humphrey Bogart's. (Though if you haven't seen "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," especially, you are missing out.) But just because a film has a perfect score doesn't mean everything. It's not automatically as challenging for an older film to get high ranks, if there are only so many pieces of criticism from which to aggregate. That Humphrey Bogart has ten films with a perfect score is pretty remarkable, but when you look into which films of his have that score, the situation becomes a little more nuanced.