Don Quixote (1992)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
After reading about exciting lives involving knights and other creations, a man takes on the name of Don Quixote (Francisco Reiguera) and gets a sidekick in Sancho Panza (Akim Tamiroff) and the two head off to fight the evils but Quixote soon finds out that's not so easy in an ever changing world.
If you know anything about Orson Welles then you know that DON QUIXOTE was one of his dream projects. If you know anything about the history of this film then you already know what a production nightmare it was. If you happen to be reading this without knowing the film's history then it's best that you actually go out and read about it. There are many great, very detailed articles and books out there but the short version is that this began life as a TV project but Welles decided to turn it into a feature but there were countless production problems and what began shooting in 1957 wasn't even complete in 1969 when the lead actor died. After countless legal battle, Jess Franco was able to get the job as editor and put together the current version that is out there now but the debate goes on from this as his version features footage that Welles didn't shoot and there's still a lot of missing footage that couldn't be used due to legal issues.
A lot of the hatred for this "film" went in the direction of Franco, which just wasn't fair. If you read about the production and legal issues with this film then it's really hard to blame anyone except for Welles and especially when you considered that he just kept shooting new stuff for nearly a decade and he kept running into more and more problems. It certainly wasn't Franco's fault that Welles didn't really have a narrative for the film and it's not Franco's fault that there were legal issues that prevented all of Welles' footage from being included. However, with that said, what's here is mildly entertaining in its own surreal way.
I say that because there's all sorts of footage here that more times than not doesn't make sense. The film was shot silent with the plan of adding narration and dialogue at a later time. Some of the narration was done by Welles himself but some of it he didn't record so another person had to pretend to be Welles and add it rather obviously. The two main performances were rather interesting to say the least and throughout the various formats that the film is shot, there's something here that remains entertaining and it's just so surreal that you can't help but be drawn into it. At 115-minutes the film does run on a bit too much but perhaps Franco just wanted to get as much footage in as possible.
Having said that, you could have given this footage to twenty different directors and they probably would have turned in completely different versions. The bottom line is that there's some interesting and weird footage here but it's impossible to know what Welles would have done with it. His brilliant mind might have been able to take ten-years worth of footage and make better sense out of it. We'll just sadly never know because Welles was unable to edit his film and this is all we go. So, do we just let the film remain unreleased or do we try and edit something together to honor the filmmaker? I personally don't have a problem with this edit. If some day we get a new edit I will watch that too but it still won't be Welles' version, which is just never going to happen.
