“Too Much Johnson”...Richard Brody's comments

"“Too Much Johnson,” All Welles"

by

Richard Brody

November 26th, 2013

The New Yorker

News of the rediscovery and preservation of sixty-six minutes of footage shot by Orson Welles in 1938 made me both eager and skeptical. The film was intended to serve as prologues to the three acts of Welles’s stage production of the play “Too Much Johnson”; its seemingly miraculous reappearance and restoration could, I feared, prove to be of greater interest than the material itself, which was unveiled at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival last month. Monday night’s New York première, at the DGA Theatre, allayed any such fears. The film is far more than a curiosity; it’s a major rediscovery, one that deeply traces the roots of Welles’s art, both stylistically and thematically—and its importance is revealed all the more by the magnificent scholarship that went into the restoration, which was done under the auspices of the George Eastman House.

The 1894 play that Welles staged was an elaborate romantic farce starring Joseph Cotten as a philandering New York playboy who flees to Cuba with his mistress’s husband in hot pursuit. It involves mistaken identity, sudden revelations, an elaborate batch of side stories that Welles trimmed out, and a complex setup that the film footage was intended to supplant. The rediscovered footage was a work print that Welles edited with his own hands, but it still had a long way to go—some sequences feature unedited multiple takes. Nonetheless, the footage, both as shot and as edited, reveals a distinctive visual preoccupation that would flourish there and throughout his career. Already in early 1938, at the age of twenty-two, Welles had a cinematic sensibility that went radically against the grain of prevailing Hollywood practices, defying and outrunning—by means of an extreme pictorialism—the finely tuned, script-centered classicism of the studios’ golden age.

The screening was augmented both by Philip C. Carli’s live electric-piano accompaniment, based on the original score by Paul Bowles, and by live commentary from Eastman House specialists who worked on the project, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Daniela Currò, Anthony L’Abbate, and Caroline Yeager. And what they unearth is astonishing and moving—especially for a native New Yorker.

Welles staged the play as a period piece, and the movie was intended as an homage to silent cinema, with references to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops and Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last”—and with the action sped up to resemble silent-film projection—but there are hints of Sergei Eisenstein throughout. The opening sequence features Cotten and the woman in question (Arlene Francis) in her bedroom, a cardboard contrivance of explicit artifice from which Cotten climbs through the rickety window to come out—with a visual jolt—on the fire escape of a big Manhattan building.

That’s where the true wonder begins. The mustachioed husband chases Cotten through the Washington Market (now the meatpacking district); amid the comedy, Welles delights in pure geometric form, with overhead shots that flatten the characters against enormous numbers of circular baskets and rectangular crates. (There’s also an ingenious jump-cut sequence in which the action leaps from foreground to background along an array of parallel alleys.) Then the “Safety Last” chills, done with overt realism, kick in: Cotten takes to the sloping roofs of old buildings in the market district, running along them with an intrepid indifference and clambering atop them while wrestling with a heavy extension ladder that threatens to hurl him to the ground with its counterweight. It’s not a sequence for acrophobes to watch.

The chase continues along the fire escapes and roofs farther down on the lower West Side, in what was then the Syrian neighborhood, near what is now the World Trade Center. (In their commentary, the scholars explain the meticulous detective work that went into their identification of the exact locations where Welles filmed.) The buildings are from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Welles films them at cocked angles that make the rooflines slashing diagonals of dynamic vectors and turn a series of chimneys into a jagged cutout of abstraction against the sky. For all its visual invention, there’s an essential element of documentary at work, a fascination with the tones and textures, the forms and moods of the teeming, clotted, already old-fashioned neighborhood.

The old-city sequence, together with other, even more overtly historicized scenes featuring a comical restaging of a suffragette march and the arrival of an already antique automobile at a dock (followed, pointedly, by a horse-drawn carriage) reveal that, for Welles, their essential subject was their antiquity. At the age of twenty-two, Welles was already making a film suffused with nostalgia. He depicts a raw, rough-and-tumble city and the changes afoot, summoning childhood memories and family lore to conjure a world that was vanishing. With his unpolished but highly confected comedy, he was already looking ahead to the regretful retrospective tragedies of “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

The “Cuban” sequences were filmed in upstate New York, in a quarry near the Hudson River, with rented palm trees serving as the outdoor décor. Here, Welles emphasizes another aspect of his visual imagination: the contrast between foreground and background. He puts Cotten in closeup, on a side of the screen, while his pursuer is clearly seen in the deep background; or there’s a palm frond in the foreground, action in the middle ground, the river shimmering far away. Welles was anticipating the extreme deep-focus methods of his first features. Above all, he was already detaching the image from dialogue, creating images that weren’t merely illustrative but highly expressive; his sense of visual storytelling was based on an intensity of rhetorical inflection. He wasn’t just filming a story, he was creating a picture-track to which his radio-based soundtracks would line up contrapuntally.

Had Welles made no films but the footage for “Too Much Johnson,” he would have been an inspiration to assiduous filmmakers in search of artistic liberation. With this occasional footage—which was never completed and never used in Welles’s actual stage production’s two-week run—Welles was already, secretly, a filmmaker for the ages.

The footage of “Too Much Johnson” was preserved in its very incompletion, including its essentially unedited sequences. I hope that a DVD of it becomes available soon—and that it remains intact and is presented exactly as it was last night, with Carli’s music and a commentary track. The unexpected discovery was too good not to be widely known, and to enter belatedly into the history of cinema intact.


Orson Welles' film “Too Much Johnson” discovered

"Too Much Johnson" redux

"Too Much Johnson" redux

Joseph Cotton and Edgar Barrier in the 1938 Orson Welles film Too Much Johnson.

"Orson Welles lost film screened in Italy"

Too Much Johnson, a silent film made by Orson Welles in 1938 and lost for three decades, has been restored and is being screened in Italy

by

Martin Chilton

October 9th, 2013

The Telegraph

Too Much Johnson, the first professional film made by Orson Welles and which has been lost for 30 years, is being shown in Italy today after being mysteriously recovered from a removal company warehouse. The silent film was found by the staff of Cinemazero, an art house in Pordenone.

Demand to see the film – a slapstick comedy which stars a young Joseph Cotton as a playboy who flees the violent husband of his mistress – has been so high that organisers of the Giornate del Cinema Muto annual silent film festival in Pordenone have been forced to add extra showings.

 The 40-minute film was made three years before Welles directed Citizen Kane in 1941, but it was never publicly screened. It is believed to be his first professional film and was intended to be shown as part of a performance of an 1894 play by William Gillette, when theatre director Welles was making his transition to film-making.

Restorer Paolo Cherchi Usa told AFP: "The discovery is a real detective novel of a story. It is a real mystery. I only have a few facts. The reels were in surprisingly good shape even though they were not kept in the right conditions, except for one where you could not see a thing which was restored in the Netherlands."

Usai carried out most of the restoration himself at the George Eastman House film institute in Rochester, New York, where the original is now being stored. The film will be screened in America next week.

 Usai added: "We have been inundated with requests and the showing in Italy has been booked out for months. We have been forced to organise two more showings on Friday to accommodate all the requests."

The film, which was produced by John Houseman, also starred Edgar Barrier, Arlene Francis and Ruth Ford. Welles had a small role as a Keystone Kop. Welles, who died in 1985 at the age of 70, never allowed the footage to be seen publicly, stating the film would not make sense outside of the full context of the play. The copy he owned was destroyed in a fire at his Madrid villa in 1970.

Orson Welles played a cop in Too Much Johnson.

Joseph Cotton with a surprised Arlene Francis.

Orson Welles' film “Too Much Johnson” discovered

Orson Welles' film “Too Much Johnson” discovered

Arlene Francis with a photo of Joseph Cotten in a scene from "Too Much Johnson."

"Early Film by Orson Welles Is Rediscovered"

by

Dave Kehr

August 7th, 2013

The New York Times

In 1941, Orson Welles made his debut as a feature film director with “Citizen Kane,” a fact well known to everyone who has ever taken Film 101.

Less well known is that “Kane” wasn’t Welles’s debut as a filmmaker. That distinction belongs to “Hearts of Age,” an eight-minute parody of an avant-garde allegory that Welles, as the world’s most precocious teenager, codirected with a friend, William Vance, at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill. Amazingly, that 1934 effort, in which Welles wears old-age makeup that anticipates the elderly Kane, has survived, and can even be seen on YouTube.

But neither was “Kane” Welles’s first professional encounter with the cinema. That happened three years before his Hollywood debut, in the form of about 40 minutes of footage intended to be shown with “Too Much Johnson,” a revival of an 1894 farce that Welles intended to bring to Broadway for the 1938 season of his Mercury Theater.

The cast of “Too Much Johnson” included several members of his Mercury troupe: Joseph Cotten, Arlene Francis, Howard Smith, Edgar Barrier, Mary Wickes and Welles’s wife at the time, Virginia Nicholson, billed under her stage name, Anna Stafford. The music was composed by Paul Bowles (who later wrote “The Sheltering Sky”); legend has it that an aspiring comedian named Judith Tuvim, later Judy Holliday, was one of the extras.

For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist.

Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it.

Sometime in the 1960s, as Welles told Frank Brady for an article in the November 1978 issue of American Film, he came across the material again, in his villa in Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was,” Welles recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present.”

Regrettably, while Welles was away for an acting job, a fire destroyed the villa and most of its contents. “Too Much Johnson,” which had been shot on highly inflammable nitrate stock, had apparently been lost to the ages.

But things have turned out otherwise. “Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Old films turn up with some regularity under similar circumstances — independent filmmakers aren’t always known for promptly paying their storage bills — but because nitrate becomes even more dangerously unstable as it ages, the usual practice is to junk it as quickly as possible.

This time, though, the movie gods were smiling. Pordenone happens to be home to Cinemazero, a cultural organization that regularly screens classic films, and which each fall partners with the Cineteca del Friuli to present Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, a gathering of scholars and cinephiles with a special dedication to the shadowy corners of film history.

The Cinemazero staff realized what they’d found and turned the footage over to George Eastman House in Rochester, where the work of stabilizing the film and transferring it to modern safety stock is proceeding with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. “Too Much Johnson” is scheduled to have its premiere in Pordenone during this year’s festival, which begins on Oct. 5, and will be screened at Eastman House on Oct. 16. If the financing can be found, the foundation will offer the film over the Internet later in the year.

In the meantime, the frame enlargements from “Too Much Johnson” that have been released suggest a young filmmaker — Welles was all of 23 at the time — with a striking command of his medium. The images are unmistakably his, with their strong, close-cropped compositions, powerful diagonals and insistent, ironic use of the “heroic angle” — the positioning of the camera to look up at the actor as if he were a statue posed on a pedestal.

There are no heroes in “Too Much Johnson” — only a frantic womanizer from Yonkers named Augustus Billings (played by Cotten). Billings has been carrying on an extramarital indiscretion under the invented identity of the owner of a plantation in Cuba named Johnson — a figure who, inconveniently enough, actually exists, as Billings discovers when he arrives in Santiago, Chile, in the company of his wife (Nicholson), his mother-in-law (Wickes) and a jealous husband (Barrier).

Each act of the play — written by the celebrated actor William Gillette as a vehicle for himself — was to begin with a film segment. The first (and most nearly completed in the rediscovered print) was a chase across Lower Manhattan shot in the style of a silent comedy, complete with Keystone Kop-like pursuers, a suffragist parade to barrel through and Cotten tottering on the edge of a skyscraper like Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last.”

Working with Paul Dunbar, a cameraman with Pathé News, Welles shot a large amount of footage for “Too Much Johnson” — some 25,000 feet, nearly four hours’ worth — and apparently had a good time doing it. Home movies of the shoot, taken by a Mercury Theater investor and preserved in the Pacific Film Archive, show Welles wearing a battered straw hat and bellowing orders to his actors, who are splashing around in a flooded Hudson Valley rock quarry meant to represent the Caribbean. Laughing and animated, the slim, young Welles is clearly already under the spell of the apparatus he would call, at the time of “Kane,” “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”

For Simon Callow, the British actor, director and Welles biographer (“The Road to Xanadu”), the most important development came next, as Welles sequestered himself with an editing machine in his suite at the St. Regis in Manhattan in a frantic attempt to assemble the film in time for the play’s out-of-town tryout.

“The great thing that happened to him on ‘Too Much Johnson’ was that he discovered editing, and began to see the possibilities,” Mr. Callow wrote in an e-mail from London. “I suspect that at that point he suddenly lost interest in the production altogether and would have loved to have continued his celluloid self-education.”

The education ended abruptly. For reasons that remain unclear — perhaps because a few cast members complained to Actors Equity that they weren’t being paid enough to appear in a film; perhaps because the Connecticut theater couldn’t accommodate a movie projector — the prologue footage was scrapped. The play didn’t make much sense without it, and the decision was made not to take it to Broadway, much to Welles’s disappointment.

“He was a complete tyro,” Mr. Callow wrote, “discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work.”

Come October, we’ll at last be in a position to know if it did.

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