Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.
TOO MUCH JOHNSON
Synopsis
The film was not intended to stand by itself, but was designed as the cinematic aspect of Welles’s Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy about a New York playboy who flees from the violent husband of his mistress and borrows the identity of a plantation owner in Cuba.
Synopsis
The film was not intended to stand by itself, but was designed as the cinematic aspect of Welles’s Mercury Theatre stage presentation of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy about a New York playboy who flees from the violent husband of his mistress and borrows the identity of a plantation owner in Cuba.
Our take
What’s this, you thought Citizen Kane was enfant terrible Orson Welles’ directorial debut? Wrong! The madcap artiste was playing with cinema even before then, as this recently found and restored curiosity testifies. This is cinema freed of constraints: playful, surreal, pretentious—Welles!