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.
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