Long-lost Orson Welles film found in Italy

NEW YORK CITY, USA – A long-lost silent film that Orson Welles directed in 1938 has been recovered from a warehouse in northeastern Italy, where it will be screened in public for the first time this October.

“Too Much Johnson” was originally intended to be shown as a prologue to a slapstick comedy at the Mercury Theatre in New York, but it was never finished.

Welles was a co-founder of the Mercury. 

Until the staff of the Cinemazero art house cinema in Pordenone, Italy, found the work print in a warehouse earlier this year, it had been widely assumed in cinema circles that the only known copy was lost in a fire that gutted Welles’ home outside Madrid in 1970.

How it wound up in Italy “is still a mystery,” said Kellie Fraver, a spokeswoman for the George Eastman House museum of film and photography in Rochester, New York, which announced the film’s recovery on August 7.

Experts in the Netherlands have brought the film back to life without resorting to digital help.

The restored copy of “Too Much Johnson” will get its world premiere on October 9 at the Giornate del cinema muto silent-film festival in Pordenone, with a US premiere to follow a week later at the George Eastman House.

“Holding in one’s hands the very same print that had been personally edited by Orson Welles 75 years ago provokes an emotion that’s just impossible to describe,” said George Eastman House film curator Paolo Cherci Usai.

Welles is best known for directing the 1941 classic “Citizen Kane,” still regarded today as a primer on filmmaking, and for voicing the 1938 sci-fi radio drama “The War of the Worlds” at the Mercury.

It is now a legend in the canon of pop culture that this broadcast, adapted from the H.G. Wells novel, had caused panic and outrage in New York at the time, about a year before the debacle of World War II.  

The most recent adaptation of “The War of the Worlds” is Steven Spielberg ‘s 2005 film, starring Tom Cruise.

Welles’ other landmark films include “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” and “Touch of Evil.”

Welles, who died in Los Angeles in 1985 at the age of 70, remains a leading influence in cinema, having inspired the French New Wave in the 1950s and America’s own cinematic trailblazing in the 1960s and ’70s, led by directors Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola. – Rappler.com