Film historian Joseph McBride’s work on Orson Welles continues to impress.
McBride has authored acclaimed books and articles on Welles’ film work, appeared in the still-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind, and is credited with the 1970 discovery in a Connecticut library of a copy of Welles’ first foray into film – the 1934 short Hearts of Age.
It is fitting that McBride has weighed in on the recent release of another Wellesian pre-Citizen Kane effort, Too Much Johnson.
The silent Too Much Johnson footage was intended for use in a 1938 stage production by the Mercury Theatre. Believed lost for decades, it was discovered in an Italian warehouse and restored by George Eastman House. The footage was first shown in Italy and the United States in October 2013.
In a wonderfully detailed and insightful piece written for Bright Lights film journal, McBride critiques the film and notes instances of “extreme contrasts between foreground and background in shots with considerable depth of field … (and) Welles’s penchant for high overhead angles looking down from a cool, godlike perspective on tiny figures scurrying around, antlike.”
“In Too Much Johnson you can also see particularly vivid traces of a filmmaker Welles revered, Buster Keaton, and his glorious Cops in the repeated shots of empty or virtually empty cityscapes into which the action gracefully erupts – characters running in and out of frame, a horse cart inadvertently rescuing the hero, and creative use of street geography. There’s a brilliant sequence in the Welles film (one of its few uses of camera trickery) with people and the horse cart chasing each other from all sides, in and out of frame, left to right and then right to left and vice versa, using stop-motion photography with a static camera in long shot, followed by closer perspectives on the action. The sometimes hazy cinematography of these dusty old buildings is beautiful in its own right, as was the look of Keaton’s films.”
McBride provides a rich history of the footage and recalls a decades-old conversation with Welles about Too Much Johnson and the late director’s assertion that the film perished in a fire in his Madrid home. How the film turned up in an Italian warehouse decades later has not been fully explained.
McBride delivers welcome news that there are plans for a wider distribution of Too Much Johnson and to have it available for all to see at www.filmpreservation.org perhaps later in 2014.
Read McBride’s piece online at Bright Lights.
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