Welles never completed Too Much Johnson, and even if he had, it wouldn't have been shown as a regular movie. It was meant to be part of a stage production by the Mercury Theatre, the adventurous New York troupe that Welles and producer John Houseman established in 1937. Their idea was to turn Gillette's knockabout play into a knockabout multimedia spectacle, alternating action on the stage with movie footage on the screen. Like the film, the theatrical show was never finished, and after a few preview performances (without the films, which the theater couldn't properly project, or Paul Bowles's music score, which wasn't ready) it vanished from the scene.
The movie footage vanished along with it, and few Welles admirers thought it would ever be found, much less restored, preserved, and made available for all to see. Amazingly, however, that's what happened. The rediscovery happened in 2013, when the ten long-lost reels turned up in a shipping company's warehouse in Pordenone, Italy, where they had been stowed away and forgotten about since the 1970s, for reasons that remain unclear. Pordenone is a major European center of film culture, hosting an annual festival of silent cinema attended by critics, scholars, and cinephiles from countries around the world. It's also the home of the Cinemazero organization, which found the Welles footage and sent it to the George Eastman House in the United States, which stabilized the material and transferred it to modern film stock with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
How does Too Much Johnson stack up against Welles classics like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil (1958)? That's not really a fair question, since Too Much Johnson wasn't designed as conventional movie-theater fare, and in any case Welles was still in the first stages of learning film technique. To appreciate the scattered plot, it's helpful to know a little about Gillette's play, which isn't a great work, but has a reasonable amount of energy and wit. It centers on Augustus Billings, a married man hiding his amorous adventures by masquerading as a made-up person named Johnson, who supposedly runs a Cuban sugar-plantation actually owned by Billy Lounsberry, one of Billings's old college friends. The trick works until Billings travels to Cuba with his wife and mother-in-law. There he finds to his dismay that Lounsberry has sold out and moved away, and that the fictitious Johnson now has a counterpart who's all too real. The movie's Billings is portrayed by Joseph Cotten, who played key roles in Welles's first two features soon afterward. The supporting cast includes Virginia Nicholson, then Welles's wife; Arlene Francis, later a popular movie, stage, radio, and TV actress; and Erskine Sanford, who acted in several of Welles's subsequent pictures.
What's marvelous about Too Much Johnson isn't the scrambled story, it's the inventive action that spills across the screen, showing clear signs of Welles's distinctive style a full three years before Citizen Kane put his cinematic brilliance on full display. Some of the most striking scenes take place high in the air as Cotten and costar Edgar Barrier do a frantic chase across the rooftops of lower Manhattan, almost outdoing even Harold Lloyd, whose 1923 comedy Safety Last contains some of the most hair-raising stunts in any silent film. There's no trickery involved, either - look closely and you'll see that the actors (especially Cotten, who evidently had nerves of steel) are really and truly running, climbing, scrambling, and sliding at scarily high altitudes above the city streets.
Back on terra firma for the rest of the film, Welles favors relatively low camera positions that look up at the actors, lending them a taller, more imposing appearance. Low-angle shots like these abound in Citizen Kane and remained one of Welles's most instantly recognizable trademarks. Also present is the crisp deep-focus cinematography (by Paul Dunbar and Harry Dunham, both behind the camera for the first and only time) that became another Welles trademark.
Sometimes the visuals point toward Citizen Kane even more directly, as when a goofy pursuit occurs in a warehouse block crammed full of boxes, baskets, and crates, prefiguring the vast storage vault where Charles Foster Kane's belongings are amassed at the end of the 1941 film. But there's a crucial difference: Kane's possessions symbolize his fatal flaws of materialism and acquisitiveness, whereas the city square in Too Much Johnson becomes a crazy maze for dandified fall guys to chase each other through, their straw hats amusingly mirrored by the shapes of the baskets piled high around them. Eventually they wreck the place, anticipating Kane's climactic rampage through his home, and finally there's a slapstick free-for-all complete with comical Keystone-style cops, two of them played by none other than Welles and Houseman.
Welles was still schooling himself in silent-screen comedy techniques, but he already knew enough to undercrank the camera for speeded-up effects and to elicit marvelously off-kilter facial expressions from the actors. For a director who'd worked mainly in radio and theater until then, he also had a sure touch with wide-ranging action. You see this when a character barges through crowds knocking people's hats off - he needs to identify a rival by a photograph, but the photo is torn in half, showing only the top of the rival's head - and again in a cliff-top chase near the end, which comes to a watery conclusion almost worthy of a Buster Keaton film.
One of Welles's biographers, Simon Callow, told film historian Dave Kehr that when the young director embarked on Too Much Johnson he was "a complete tyro, discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work." This particular experiment wasn't entirely successful - it wasn't entirely finished, for that matter - but the experience Welles gathered served him well in movies to come. Along with several masterworks, his famously turbulent career produced a number of partially made features that time, money, and film-industry vicissitudes prevented him from polishing and releasing before his death. We may never see The Deep or Don Quixote or The Other Side of the Wind in exactly the forms that he intended. The same goes for Too Much Johnson, but even as a fragmentary vision it's great fun to watch.
Director: Orson Welles
Producers: Orson Welles, John Houseman
Screenplay: Orson Welles; based on William Gillette's play
Cinematographers: Paul Dunbar, Harry Dunham
Film Editing: Orson Welles, William Alland, Richard Wilson
Art Direction: James Morcom
Costume Design: Leo Van Witsen
With: Joseph Cotten (Augustus Billings), Virginia Nicholson (Lenore Faddish), Edgar Barrier (Leon Dathis), Arlene Francis (Clairette Dathis), Ruth Ford (Mrs. Billings), Mary Wickes (Mrs. Upton Battison), Eustace Wyatt (Francis Faddish), Guy Kingsley Poynter (Henry MacIntosh), George Duthie (ship's purser), Erskine Sanford (Frederick), Orson Welles (cop), John Houseman (duelist, cop)
BW-66m.
by David Sterritt
