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Seventy-five years after its aborted premiere at the Stony Creek Theatre in Branford, Connecticut, Orson Welles’ footage for the stage show “Too Much Johnson” was shown on October 9, 2013 at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. a silent film fest, in Pordenone, Italy.
The workprint, presumed lost for decades, was found in a Pordeone warehouse and restored by George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.
Blogger David Cairns and the film website Silent London provided the first detailed reviews of the 40 minutes of silent film Welles planned to use to accompany the William Gillette stage comedy about a New York playboy who flees to Cuba to avoid a jealous husband. A 20-minute prologue and two 10-minute bits, which would have run before the second and third acts, were filmed in New York City with Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Virginia Nicolson and other members of the Mercury Theatre.
“‘Too Much Johnson’ is not just a curio from theatre history. These reels are not quite a film, but something far more than fragments,” reported Silent London. “The experience of watching them on a big screen, projected from 35mm, with expert piano accompaniment from Philip Carli, and commentary from Paolo Cherchi Usai, was dream-like, exhilarating and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. Because we don’t have a final cut of ‘Too Much Johnson’, the footage includes retakes, gaps and mistakes. The extant material is a hint of what might have been – but also the heights that Welles was to achieve later in his career.”
The website added, “This is slapstick, ostensibly of the rowdy Keystone school, but from the off it is enlivened by some decidedly arty touches: this is a very good-looking piece of work. All the footage was shot undercranked to create that Keystone feel, a blanket measure that creates some queasy side-effects. An early argument scene is edited so frenetically, with so many extreme closeups, that it is more Eisenstein with Mack Sennett. An anarchic running gag in those first interior scenes has pot plants bursting into the frame, not least in what I can only describe as an arthouse comedy sex scene, an ultra-high-speed bedroom farce. And as Joseph Cotten (our reckless hero) and Edgar Barrier (the outraged husband of his lover) pursue each other up and down fire escapes and across rooftops, the camera records it all from the acute Expressionist angles Welles was so well known for. A scene of Barrier patrolling Manhattan knocking men’s hats off their heads is shot from high overhead – as Barrier attacks the crowds and the crowds form into mobs to attack back, the effect is of a musical dance sequence, a street ballet. And the sight of the ground after his spree littered with discarded bowlers and boaters is almost surreal, surprisingly poignant.”
On his blog, David Cairns wrote, “What was screened, though incomplete, uncut, full of alternate takes, and missing the chunks of narrative that would have been performed live (since the film was only one element in a stage show), is entertaining, funny, Wellesian and, by virtue of its very roughness, extremely revealing of Welles working practice. It’s supposed to be a slapstick silent comedy set around the end of the nineteenth century but clearly evoking 1910s Keystone Cops comedy — but Welles can’t help displaying his nascent sensibility, so the deliberately stagy interiors and planimetric chase scenes alternate with bursts of semi-Eisensteinian montage frenzy, and dutch tilts, looming low angles, fast pans — Welles hasn’t discovered camera movement yet, but you could practically say that visually, apart from that, it’s all there.”
Restorer Paolo Cherchi Usai told the AFP news service that film lovers and journalists from around the world came to the showing.
“We have been inundated with requests and the showing has been booked out for months. We have been forced to organise two more showings on Friday to accommodate all the requests,” he said.
The U.S. premiere will take place October 16 in Rochester, N.Y., at the George Eastman House.
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