by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After last night’s Lifetime movie I ran an item Charles had
been particularly interested in watching from archive.org: Adventures of Don
Quixote, a 1933 film originally shot in
France (at the Vittorine Studios in Nice, where Rex Ingram worked in the late
1920’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald visited him and set a key scene in Tender
Is the Night) and apparently filmed in
three languages, French, English and German. The director was the German G. W.
Pabst, who had just fled Germany because he’d got on the Nazis’ shit-list for
radical-Left movies like The Threepenny Opera, Westfront 1918 (essentially the German version of All Quiet on the Western
Front) and Kameradschaft (about a group of German and Russian coal miners who
each dig a rescue tunnel from their end of the mineshaft to rescue a group of
miners trapped between by a cave-in). Don Quixote was his first film outside Germany (Pabst, like
Fritz Lang, was actually Austrian but he’d been a leading light in Weimar
Germany and had made great movies like The Joyless Street with Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo, The
Love of Jeanne Ney, Secrets of the Soul —
the first film to deal with psychoanalysis, for which Pabst used Carl Jung as
his technical advisor after Sigmund Freud turned him down — and the great
Louise Brooks vehicles Pandora’s Box
and Diary of a Lost Girl) and its
star was the great Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. Unfortunately the
film was subjected to several hatchet jobs (as were quite a few of Pabst’s
films — The Joyless Street was
originally two hours but the only version I’ve seen is a one-hour cut-down
designed to make Garbo, who originally played the second female lead, look like
the star) and the version we were watching was an English-language release
lasting only 55 minutes. I’d much rather see a subtitled print of the 73-minute
French version, not only because I suspect the plot would be more coherent
(though the episodic nature of Miguel de Cervantes’ source novel would make any adaptation seem episodic as well) but because
Chaliapin was familiar with French — he’d sung French operas in the original
language many times — where he seems so totally at sea in English he sounds
like he’s gargling through much of his dialogue (less so when he’s singing one
of the five songs Jacques Ibert wrote for the film) and I suspect he didn’t
actually know English and learned his lines phonetically like Bela Lugosi did.
(The German version is believed to be lost, though that hasn’t stopped an
imdb.com reviewer from claiming they’ve seen it.)
It’s an uneven movie,
beautifully photographed by Colemar Nichols and quite well staged by Pabst —
it’s similar to The Threepenny Opera
in the skill with which the songs are integrated into the action instead of the
movie just coming to a dead stop for a production number the way most American
musicals of the time did — but it’s also a quirky one. I’ve never read Don
Quixote and so I can’t vouch for the
fidelity (or lack thereof) of this film to the source, but I get the impression
this would be difficult material for anyone to film and it’s not surprising that major directors
like Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam have come a-cropper with it. Chaliapin is a
powerful presence on screen and one can readily see why he wowed ’em in the
theatre (especially in his signature roles, the title characters in
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and
Boïto’s Mefistofele), but he also
gets oppressive at times. His Sancho Panza is the great British comedian George
Robey, who’d become a star in the 1916 British musical The Bing Boys and whose last film — indeed, his last work of any
sort — was as Sir John Falstaff in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of
Shakespeare’s Henry V.
(Shakespeare merely alluded to Falstaff’s death, but Olivier decided he needed
at least a silent scene of it and seems to have called on Robey because he was
really fatally ill and that would add verisimilitude — just as Edward G.
Robinson’s powerful death scene in his last film, Soylent Green, was filmed when he’d been diagnosed with terminal
cancer and the fact that both he and everyone else on the film knew he was dying for real imbued that scene with
intense, powerful emotion missing from the rest of the film.)
Robey is a
marvelous foil to Chaliapin and supplies the human realism the film desperately
needs, but the rest of the cast (at least in the English version — apparently
Chaliapin was in all three, but his supporting actors were different in each
language) is reliably good in the manner of British actors but somewhat at sea
in the frankly unrealistic character of the story. One aspect of the film that
rubbed me the wrong way was that it ends with the burning of Don Quixote’s book
collection — the opening scenes establish that Quixote has squandered his whole
fortune buying books about knight-errantry and by reading them has acquired the
delusion that he is a knight-errant himself, and we’re supposed to see the
burning of his books as a positive
event, one that marks his return to reality and sanity. This seems a strange
way to end a movie made by a director who had fled the Nazi tyranny — though,
for reasons Pabst’s biographers are still arguing about, he returned to Germany
in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s and made the film Paracelsus during World War II, using the legendary real-life
doctor’s story as a metaphor for the Nazi ideals of an heroic superman guiding
the destiny of lesser humans. Then, a decade later, he worked in his original
homeland, Austria, and made The Last Ten Days, a story of Hitler’s demise in the Berlin bunker in
World War II that’s often been considered one of the best biopics ever made
about Der Führer, though I’ve
never seen it — just the 1980 TV-movie remake with Anthony Hopkins.
