Paolo Cherchi Usai is senior curator of moving image at George Eastman House and cofounder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival

The recent discovery in Italy of a nitrate work print of Orson Welles's first professional foray into cinema, superbly restored by George Eastman House, reveals the pre-Kane auteur falling in love with filmmaking and the addictive art of editing. When Welles took on the direction of Mercury Theatre's 1938 stage production of Too Much Johnson, William Gillette's 1894 farce of philandering and mistaken identities, he decided to use film as a a prologue for each act of the play. Despite shooting over four hours of footage, Welles never completed the three-part film, and for decades it was believed lost. Mercury's ensemble players, with Joseph Cotten in the lead role, share Welles's pleasure and playfulness in this inventive homage to silent comedy. “Already in early 1938, at the age of twenty-two, Welles had a cinematic sensibility that went radically against the grain of prevailing Hollywood practices, defying and outrunning-by means of an extreme pictorialism-the finely tuned, script-centered classicism of the studios' golden age” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). With on-location sequences of the serial lover fleeing across rooftops and through markets of lower Manhattan, Too Much Johnson is also a fascinating document of the prewar cityscape.