by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Too Much Johnson is a
Welles project with an even weirder genesis than Jane Eyre: made in 1938, two years before Welles signed with
RKO and made Citizen Kane, the
film was originally part of a multi-media spectacle Welles wanted to stage
based on a play actor-writer William Gillette wrote in 1894. The play features
a woman who’s dating three guys named (or at least using the name of) Johnson, and takes place both in New
York City and Cuba, where the main Johnson (played in Welles’ production by the
almost unrecognizably young Joseph Cotten) flees and is confronted by his
girlfriend’s husband and several other characters. Welles decided to shoot
filmed prologues for each of the play’s three acts, deciding that the movie
medium would work better to set the stage for Gillette’s complicated plot than
long, dialogue-drenched expository scenes. Alas, though Welles had legally
licensed the stage rights to Gillette’s copyrighted play, he hadn’t taken into
account that movie rights were an entirely separate matter; what eventually
became Paramount studios had purchased the film rights to Too Much
Johnson in 1912 and made a silent film of
the play in 1919, and when they got word that Welles was planning to show his
own film adaptations of scenes from Too Much Johnson as part of a production of the play, they went to
court and slapped an injunction on him forbidding him from doing so.
In 1969
Welles sat for an interview with Charles Higham for a book called The
Films of Orson Welles — though when the
book was published two years later Welles angrily severed ties with Higham,
saying the book had misrepresented him and in particular objecting to Higham’s
allegation that Welles didn’t properly finish his films because he had a
psychological block against doing so — and showed Higham a fully edited version
of Too Much Johnson. (This was
probably the same print Welles had shown the RKO bigwigs back in 1940 before he
signed with them to prove to them that he did know how to direct a film. This is important because
much of the promotion around the Too Much Johnson rediscovery argued that Welles never properly edited the footage.) Higham had frame
enlargements made from the movie and published them in his book, but in 1970
that print of the film was destroyed when Welles’ villa in Madrid burned. Too
Much Johnson was assumed to be a lost movie
until 2005, when a work print from which Welles had worked on his editing in an
archive in the small Italian town of Pordenone. The Pordenone archive worked
with the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York on preserving and
restoring the film, and publicly premiered a 67-minute version which is
fascinating for film scholars and Welles fans but almost unwatchable by a
general audience. The reason is that instead of attempting to duplicate Welles’
editing (such as we know about it) or do anything else to make the footage
coherent, they simply ran all 67 minutes as it stood, with the result that for
no apparent reason we see multiple takes of many scenes and it’s almost
impossible to discern what is happening or why.
It occurred to me that the only
way to present Welles’ Too Much Johnson in an audience-friendly way would be to try to reconstruct Welles’
combined film-stage production, hiring modern actors to perform the play live,
making them up to look as much like the people in the movie as possible, and
showing Welles’ footage in the context for which he intended it. What survives
is a surprise mainly because it’s a comedy — as much as I love Welles’ films,
one thing they are noticeably deficient in is humor, but here he’s shooting al
fresco on the streets of New York (and
letting in a few anachronisms in a film that’s supposed to be set in the past —
Gillette wrote the play in 1894 but in the scene in which the characters drive
to the dock to take a steamer to Cuba, which Gillette called the Tropic
Queen but Welles changed to the Munificent, we see a car that looks to be from about 1912) and
clearly evoking the greats of silent comedy in general and Mack Sennett and
Charlie Chaplin in particular. There are some shots that strikingly anticipate scenes in later Welles films,
including a chase scene shot overhead in a storage room full of crates and
barrels (the resemblance to the scene in Kane’s junkroom towards the end of Citizen
Kane is instantly discernible to any Welles
fan), a sequence in which people are shown in extreme close-up wearing
forbidding hats that a malicious character goes about knocking off their heads
that anticipates the sequences of neighbors gossiping in The
Magnificent Ambersons, and some final
vertiginous shots of the cliffs around Cuba that (even though the locale was
undoubtedly somewhere in upstate New York) Welles repeated in The
Lady from Shanghai. But most of it is a
rambunctious farce comedy that, properly edited, scored (the archive that
re-released the film included a dreary “modern” score by Italian pop musicians
instead of the 1920’s silent-comedy score the film clearly called for) and
shown in context with scenes from the play would probably make an excellent
viewing experience — but as it is, just a bunch of rough cuts strung together
with virtually no clue for the non-cognoscenti about exactly what’s supposed to be going on, Too
Much Johnson is at least as oppressive as
it is entertaining.
