CITIZEN KANE, today widely regarded as the finest film ever made, was dismissed out of hand. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn’s defining moment, was “a film without heart”, and Brighton Rock barely made the grade.

For more than 30 years Britain’s most influential reviewer supplied his opinions of new releases to cinema-owners who subscribed to the service from the McCarthy agency, of London. The anonymous notices governed what cinema audiences would — and would not — see.

Of Citizen Kane the reviewer wrote: “The genius of Orson Welles is somewhat warped when applied to films. His ideas and the box office are poles apart.” The film was “not recommended” for screening beyond “specialised” venues.

While Welles and other artists with whom he found fault did win recognition, some directors and actors may not have been so lucky if cinema-owners were discouraged from screening their work.

The articles are among a remarkable collection that has come to light of 11,000 unpublished reviews produced between 1933 and 1965 to guide owners of cinemas about the commercial prospects of the newest releases.

Details of those films — and of the agency itself, which, by the consistency of taste and style of the reviews may have been a one-man band — will emerge once historians have waded through the archive.

Although Citizen Kane is now revered, not least for its innovative camerawork, it had only a limited initial release. In 1941 the McCarthy agency declared that it “defies all the canons of popular box-office entertainment”. It had “little to recommend it outside of the specialised hall” and “the photography is clever as far as camera angles go, but bizarre”.

Nor were cinema-owners urged to screen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the 1961 film long admired as one of Audrey Hepburn’s most delightful appearances.

Dismissing the film as “decidedly a picture for the type of people who move around in the smart set”, the reviewer wrote: “This film has a lot of teething trouble. To begin with, Hepburn is an entirely unsympathetic character, cast as a madcap girl from the country who lives on her wits. The film as a whole is completely without heart.”

James Dean in Elia Kazan’s 1955 classic East of Eden was described as a “furtive youngster who now and again reveals pleasing animation”, and John Boulting’s Brighton Rock, the 1947 brutal exploration of the British underworld starring Richard Attenborough, “barely makes the grade”.

Nor could the agency recommend Last Year in Marienbad, directed in 1962 by Alain Resnais and today seen as a landmark in cinema history. The reviewer struggled to sit through it: “Made by eggheads for eggheads . . It is, however, the handling of time which is so completely baffling. He moves from the present to the past and future and back again at a speed which would put an astronaut to shame.”

The archive was preserved by a family who once owned a provincial cinema that is now defunct. Marks in crayon on each of the typed sheets indicate whether or not the cinema ran the film, and also give a score out of ten — to an accuracy of quarters — for how successful or otherwise the film turned out to be.

Edward Maggs, the antiquarian dealer, is to offer the collection for £12,500 at this year’s Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia in June. But he may well have sold it beforehand, to judge by the interest expressed yesterday by the British Film Institute. On being contacted by The Times, David Sharp, of the BFI, said: “We’re very interested in knowing more about this as we are the world’s largest library of printed material relating to film and television — greater than the Academy in Hollywood. This would be a useful and important addition to our collections.”

Among the many films that McCarthy wholeheartedly recommended were Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (“a milestone in British pictures”), Hitchcock’s Psycho (“will make a packet of money”), Ben-Hur (“may be said to match all the superlatives of which the enthusiastic publicist is capable”) and Casablanca (“brilliantly executed”).

The Antiquarian Book Fair, the largest of its kind in Europe, will be held at Olympia, in West London, from June 8 to 11.

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