Too Much Johnson (1938)

Directed by

Orson Welles

Genre

comedy film, silent film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 06m

Rating

5.4 of 10 from 27 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a silent comedy from Orson Welles, made before his famous work. It was part of a stage show that failed because the film could not be projected. The movie was lost for decades then found and finally shown.

unfinishedsilentcomicfrenetictheatricalexperimentalplayfulfrustrating

What happens

Too Much Johnson is a 1938 American silent comedy film written and directed by Orson Welles. An unfinished film component of a stage production, it was made three years before Welles directed Citizen Kane, but it was never publicly screened. It was shot to be integrated into Welles's Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette's 1894 comedy, but the film sequences could not be shown due to the absence of projection facilities at the venue, the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut. The resulting plot confusion reportedly contributed to the stage production's failure. The film was believed to be lost, but in 2008 a print was discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy. The film premiered on October 9, 2013, at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. In 2014, the work print and a modern edit of the film were made available online by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Two previous films had been made of this play, a short film in 1900 and a feature-length Paramount film in 1919 starring Lois Wilson and Bryant Washburn. Both of these films are now lost. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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