It’s a busy week at the Museum of Modern Art, as the series Martin Scorsese Presents Republic Rediscovered: New Restorations from Paramount Pictures winds up, and Modern Matinees: Considering Joseph Cotten continues. Of particular interest is Too Much Johnson (1938), a pre-Kane Orson Welles undertaking starring Joseph Cotten, which screens on February 15.
The popular misconception that Orson Welles’ film career began when the boy wonder burst on to the scene in 1941 with Citizen Kane, what Joseph McBride calls the “director’s creation myth” is belied by a look at IMDb. In fact, Between 1933 and 1939, Welles directed three shorts and a film which was intended to be used within the context of a live stage production: Too Much Johnson. What remains is a 66 minute silent rough cut which was considered lost for decades until a print was discovered in 2008 in a warehouse in Italy.
The film is set in the first decade of the twentieth century, and is shot so as to look like it. Silent, sometimes undercranked to give it that frantic feeling, it’s a wild slapstick romp. Without the context of the stage play, and without the benefit of editing, it’s tough to discern much of a narrative thread. Nevertheless it provides a catalog of silent film references as well as an interesting look at parts of lower Manhattan. The framing avoids showing the forest of skyscrapers built in the 20s and early 30s, but includes some great
looks at the Singer Tower at Broadway and Liberty St., at the time of its completion in 1908 the tallest building in the world until the completion in 1909 of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower at 23rd and Madison. (This magnificent Victorian erection remains the tallest structure ever intentionally demolished.)
Joseph Cotten plays the dandy making love to the (married) babe (Arlene Francis). Add the irate husband (Edgar Barrier) and the chase is on. Barrier pursues Cotten through the
streets, up the fire escapes and across the rooftops of lower Manhattan, and eventually on to a ship and across Cuba. It’s one long non sequitur containing visual references to Buster Keaton in The General, Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, Eisenstein’s montage and the Keystone Kops.As mentioned above, the 66-minute cut that we’re left with is essentially a rough cut (Welles is said to have personally edited the first seven minutes). Some of the content which would presumably not have been included in a final cut now plays like a visual joke, such as the shot in which we see he two guys holding up the fake palm trees or the repeated scream reactions from two women. We’ll never know.
