Too Much Johnson1938

In 1938, three years before CITIZEN KANE, New York theater tyro Orson Welles filmed comedy sequences for his stage production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON, a rapid-fire farce of mistaken identities. The slapstick prologue features Joseph Cotten doing Harold Lloyd antics through the streets and across the rooftops of New York City, a lively tribute to silent comedy and Keystone Kops chaos, while two shorter sequences open the second and third acts of the play with chases and duels. Welles edited a rough cut but the project was abandoned and the footage was never screened. Long assumed lost, the reels were found in 2008 and then preserved through an international collaboration between the National Film Preservation Foundation, George Eastman House, the Cineteca del Friuli and Cinemazero. Seventy-five years after the images were created, the footage was given a world premiere at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2013. Though ragged and never designed to play as a stand-alone work, the sequences (assembled here as "The Films Reimagined" by film historian Scott Simmon for the National Film Preservation Foundation) are dynamic and exciting and show Welles already experimenting with intricate editing patterns, deep focus photography and labyrinthine imagery. It is a huge leap from his first film (the imaginative short THE HEARTS OF AGE) and the most exciting cinematic find of the new century to date. - Sean Axmaker