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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.
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