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Out of "old pieces of paper" a rocky feudal landscape transformed by music, G.W. Pabst past Die Dreigroschenoper and rather closer to Lubitsch. As the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, Feodor Chaliapin is a magnificent scarecrow in battered armor, his basso profundo heightened by his phonetic English—the synergy between possessed performer and character is as uncanny as that of Lugosi and Dracula. Songs to villagers are further evidence of madness, in the audience for the saltimbanques show he charges with sword in hand and recognizes the vapid milkmaid as his noble maiden. Sheep and prisoners comprise the adventure in the wilderness, the hero poses on a hilltop for a famous Picasso silhouette before reprimanding his squire for not understanding chivalry. "Maybe. But I do know my muttons." Between Eugene Pallette and Bob Hoskins, George Robey's Sancho Panza brings to La Mancha the beery lilt of London music-halls: "We live on inspiration. But a little change is good now and then." Courtyards and castles, Pabst with an Ibert score, rough drafts for Welles. Mockery endured is the natural condition of the dreamer-artist-lunatic, laughter follows Don Quixote into the fields where windmills loom like giants. (The tilting sequence is filmed with rapid cutting for the jostle and a rotating camera for the figure caught in the slats, Hitchcock absorbs a memory of it into Foreign Correspondent) The state of Europe in 1933 is evoked via the incineration of books meant to restore the protagonist's sanity, "I told you before not to speak in proverbs!" The closing aria scores a miracle over the pyre, footage reversed until blackened ashes reveal the first page of Cervantes' tome (cp. Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451). With René Donnio, Miles Mander, and Sidney Fox. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |