Don Quichotte

When he made "Don Quichotte" (1933) Georg Wilhelm Pabst was past his prime, which consists of the films he made with Louise Brooks ("Die Buchse der Pandora" and "Tagebuch einer Verlorener" both from 1929).

It is noteworthy that both Pabst and Orson Welles increasingly turned to adaptations of literature in the second half of their career. Welles mostly choses Shakespeare, Pabst first choses Brecht ("Die 3-Groschen Oper", 1931) and in this film he choses Miguel de Cervantes.

Pabst made three seperate versions of his "Don Quichotte", a French, German and Spanish one. In each version the lead character is played by the operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin. The German version is lost while the Spanish version is lower rated then the French version (which I saw). I don't know the reason why.

The essence of the Don Quichotte story is the combination of an idealistic but somewhat naive and distracted (anti) hero and a more pragmatic sidekick. This duo has become really an evergreen in literature and other art forms, although mostly in a more moderate form than in Don Quichotte. For example in "The seventh seal" (1957, Ingmar Bergman) Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is the Don Quichotte character and Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) is Sancho Panza. In "Tom Puss", a Dutch crossover between a comic and serious literature, Oliver B. Bumble is the Don Quichotte and Tom Puss the Sancho Panza.