Don Quijote de Orson Welles (1992)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

Orson Welles

Writers:

Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (novel)
Jesus Franco (additional dialogue in new edition)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

After reading too many novels about knights and heroic stories, Don Quijote and his servant Sancho Panza...

Plot Keywords:

Based On Novel | Independent Film | Character Name In Title

Cast

Francisco Reiguera	...	Don Quijote (archive footage)
Akim Tamiroff	...	Sancho Panza
Orson Welles	...	Himself (in new version) (archive footage)
José Mediavilla	...	Don Quixote (in new version) (voice)
Juan Carlos Ordóñez	...	Sancho Panza's Voice (in new version) (voice)
Constantino Romero	...	Narrator (in new version) (voice)
Fernando Rey	...	Closing Scene Narrator (in new version) (voice)
Paola Mori
Beatrice Welles
Oja Kodar

Also Known As:

Don Quixote (USA)

Runtime:

116 min | Spain:111 min

Country:

Spain | Italy | USA

Language:

Spanish

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

El Silencio Producciones

Trivia:

Finished by Jesus Franco and Patxi Irigoyen in 1992. (Orson Welles died in 1985).

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Zomergasten: (#18.1)" (2005)

This is a link to a better understanding of Welles' career as a movie maker

I have only seen Franco's release and this was indeed very poorly dubbed and a lot of the footage was barely distinguishable. Maybe Welles' cherished project should have remained a legend because as it is the movie doesn't stand for its own as more than a curiosity. But it is interesting nonetheless for the glimpse it offers in the process of film-making. Seeing as it was started sometime in the mid-fifties and took almost fourteen years of shooting until the main character unfortunately died, the movie shows the meanders it passed until it reached the form in which we can see it today. In my opinion Welles started shooting the movie with the idea of bringing Don Quixote to the screen in much the same way he had already done it with Macbeth and Othello. Unfortunately he got so tangled in the web of the story that he released there was no way that he could bring the book to the screen as it was and so he had to "adapt" it in his own magnificent personal style, much like he will do it with Falstaff. The result is an amazing story that challenges film as a medium and brings it closer to postmodern literature. What I find fascinating is the idea that Welles himself would appear in the movie that he is making, talk to the character of Sancho who desperately looks for his master and ignore him. In the movie Welles as himself makes a movie about Don Quixote but he is unwilling to listen to the character! Amazing! Welles was undoubtedly one of cinema's geniuses not only because his unique style involving extreme angles, deep focus, sequences and all that jazz, but also because he anticipated some of the concepts that will make history in later cinema. It is interesting to see that it was Welles who first understood the capacity of cinema to create illusion and play tricks, not Godard or Bergman or Jodorovsky. Of course, since his project was never released during his lifetime nobody could really acknowledge this. But I have to disagree with the people who claim this movie shouldn't even be seen, I think it should be seen by anyone seriously interested in Welles because it shows you what a great potential he really had, what a strong artistic integrity he had relentlessly going his own way, and how well he understood cinema. Seeing this movie as a link between his first two Shakespeare movie and his magnificent adaptation of Falstaff and the later F for Fake proves that Welles had a coherent career, even if hindered by penury and misunderstanding.