Don Quichotte (1933)
Directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Film Review

After making his name in pre-Nazi Germany, Georg Wilhelm Pabst began making films in France just as Adolf Hitler was coming to power.  These two events were not coincidental - Pabst's political leanings were towards the left and at first he had no taste for the kind of national socialism that Hitler and his cronies in the Nazi party represented.  By the end of the decade, Pabst's political affiliations had undergone some readjustment and on his return to Germany he was sufficiently supportive of the Nazis to resume his career there without any difficulty.  After the war, he made a point of repudiating Nazism.  With this in mind, there is some irony in the fact that the first film Pabst made in France was Don Quichotte, a reasonably faithful (albeit massively abridged) adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' early 17th century novel Don Quixote, reputed by many to be the greatest work in literature.  Many things can be said about G.W. Pabst, but no one could ever call him quixotic.

For those who have not read Cervantes' timeless novel (shame on you), it centres on an old man whose moral viewpoint is completely out of kilter with the world in which he lives.  As a result, his well-intended acts of chivalry are invariably judged to be foolish and he soon acquires the reputation of a mad man,  It is one of the characteristics of the human condition that our idea of virtue has always fluctuated.  What was deemed a noble act a century ago is likely to be considered ludicrous folly today - and this may be why Don Quixote has endured and still remains so incredibly pertinent, over four hundred years since it was first published.  The early 1930s was a time of unprecedented political and social upheaval.  Moral values had never changed so fast and public figures who were unable to move with the times were three a penny.  We see the same quixotic individuals (heroes only to themselves) in our own time.  Future generations may regard them as moral crusaders, but because they lag behind the present Zeitgeist we see them as deluded fools.

Given this historical perspective, Don Quichotte is not such an unlikely film for Pabst as it first appears.  Prior to this, the director had earned his reputation making realist films, usually in a present day setting and dealing with important contemporary issues.  His early Greta Garbo vehicle Joyless Street (1925) and finest Louise Brooks collaboration Pandora's Box (1928) were groundbreaking in both their intimacy and cold naturalism.  Don Quichotte is, unusually for Pabst, a period piece set at the time of Spain's Golden Age - long, long after the Age of Chivalry.  Just as un-Pabst-like is the tone of the film - it is mostly humorous, and even includes a few (dreadful) songs.  How many other G.W. Pabst films can you name that make you laugh out loud and cause you to stick cotton wool in your ears?

More crucially, most of Pabst's films revolve around an enigmatic woman challenged by severe exterior forces; Don Quixote, by contrast, centres on a fairly objectionable old man who is entirely the architect of his own destruction. Why would Pabst want to make such a film that seems to be so far removed from his previous work?  Could it, by chance, be intended as a subtle political allegory?  If so, who might the central character represent - a misguided party leader or those ennobling qualities (tolerance, freedom, openness) to which said party leader was opposed?  Is it so unlikely that Pabst would take Cervantes' great parable and turn it into an expression of his early revulsion for Nazism?

Pabst made three versions of the film (in German, French and English).  In each of these, the central character (referred to only as Don Quixote) is played by Fédor Chaliapine, a huge bear of a man who was not only one of Russia'a greatest opera singers at the time, but also an imposing actor with a formidable screen presence.  Chaliapine's overly mannered performance, large enough to fill an entire stage and a fair portion of the auditorium,  makes his character appear even more of a buffoon than he is on the pages of Cervantes' novel.  We cannot help but see him as every other character does (even his trusty servant Sacho Panza) - as a wildly delusional fogey.  It is not sympathy that Don Quixote de la Mancha invites as he goes about liberating flocks of sheep or defending his lady's honour in the daftest of mock duels, but the most abject form of ridicule.  He clanks about like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, his every utterance as weirdly incongruous as a soliloquy from Shakespeare would be in a modern television soap opera.

But as Don Quixote's tragic fate unfolds before our eyes, gradually we come to look on him with more sympathetic eyes.  For all his madcap exploits, he has a nobility and heroic quality that no other character in the film possesses.  This compels us to shift our perspective and we see him less as a fool or madman, and more as a saint.  Should we laugh at such an individual, a seeming lunatic who goes charging at windmills to assert his honour, or should we pity him, even admire him?  Chaliapine's errant knight may be a laughing stock at the start of his wacky adventures, but when he reaches journey's end he looks more like the martyred hero.  His values may be out-of-date, but they are the right values, and his misfortune is to exist not in the Age of Chivalry, but in a more cynical era, when decency and honour are repudiated, a source of merriment for those who act only from self-interest.

Pabst's Don Quixote is far from being the most comprehensive adaptation of Cervantes' magnificent tome, nor is it the most faithful, but it is certainly a film of remarkable quality that eloquently conveys the sense of the original novel.  The famous 'tilting and windmills' episode is stunningly interpreted, with the fearless knight spearing one of the sails of a windmill and ending up whirling around and around like something in a Looney Tunes cartoon.  This outrageously funny set-piece (nothing in any Marx Brothers will make you laugh as loudly) is followed by an even more inspired sequence, in which our hero is finally brought back to earth and forced to witness the burning of his books. Horror.

As the fire gorges itself, pages of enlightened text reduced to melting fragments of charcoal, we feel that it is the knight's soul that is being put to the flame.  Then, in the film's unforgettable last few moments, despair turns to triumph as we begin to see the title page of Cervantes' novel emerge from the flames, gradually becoming whole again as the book is returned to its original unburned state.  This is the film's most overt political statement - Pabst's reaction to the burning of 'unhealthy' books in Germany that had recently been authorised by the Nazi's propaganda minister Josef Goebbles.  The message is simple but powerfully expressed: you may burn books, you may even burn people, but the ideas they contain will endure - just as Cervantes' gallant hero has lasted through the centuries, not as a figure of fun, but as the most reliable of moral barometers.

Film Synopsis

Don Quixote squanders his fortune by buying books about chivalry, which he reads assiduously.  After doing so for many years, he believes he is himself a knight, sent on a divine mission to wrong all of the injustices in the world.  With his trusty vassal, Sancho Panza, he sets out on horseback and roams the land, intent on serving humanity as best he can.  He begins by liberating a flock of sheep, convinced they are prisoners of a loathsome enemy.  Similar acts of folly soon earn the well-meaning knight errant a reputation as a madman, and he surpasses himself when he attacks a windmill, mistaking it for a cruel giant. Captured by those who mean him well, Don Quixote is returned to his abandoned home and niece, to witness the burning of his beloved books.  This ignominious end is more than the brave knight can bear...