Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Don Chisciotte

I return in an almost systematic way to talk about the character of Don Quixote, as promised a few days ago. Just last Saturday, I saw this rare film adaptation (not outstanding) of Cervantes' masterpiece by Georg Wilhelm Pabst who in 1933 (well ahead of World War II) brought to light this first film in a sound edition, honestly neither offensive nor praiseworthy.

A film that is almost a musical (typical of those years), in the sense that many parts are sung, on not excellent and not particularly original tunes, on a screenplay very faithful to the original by Cervantes but lacking the creative verve and visual strength of "Don Quixote" treated by Wells and reviewed last time here.
We also have here the attack on the sheep, the tournament at the court of the Grand Dukes, the battle against the windmills and a whole series of episodes faithful to the original that serve more as joints with the various scenes but tell us little or nothing about the psychology of the characters.

Here, however, unlike the other cinematic reductions, we witness two particularly interesting things: the presentation of the prelude, that is the preliminary phase to the choice of becoming the Errant Knight of the Sad Figure by the protagonist (a splendid Feodor Chaliapin, hallucinated and completely immersed in the role) and a finale to say the least original and alternative, with the burning of all the books by the King, considered the cause of the metamorphosis of Don Quixote who from a simple scholar of history and philosophy, decides to "take action" embarking on the reckless and grotesque adventures we know and that will lead him to madness and death.

A decent film, in many parts predictable and boring with drops in tone especially in the Italian dubbing (with certain dialectal influences by Sancho Panza really annoying) and in the most predictable and obvious little scenes.
But the most innovative thing to remember, as I have already said, beyond some grotesque little scene of very little importance, is certainly the final scene of the "cultural burning", where all the books that had indoctrinated the Poor Quixote are considered responsible for his madness and will indeed be PUNISHED with this kind of medieval torment. A burning interpreted by many as "symbolic" of a certain extremist movement that was beginning to emerge in those years and that planned just a kind of "conceptual burning" of Culture and Reason to then lead to what will be remembered in the years as the Nazi Movement, the major cause (if not the only one) of the beginning of World War II.

A burning however that has an unexpected turn of events in the last shot when, in a reverse montage, precisely from the ashes the pages of a book (the same by Cervantes) are reformed intact, a metaphor of how no burning will EVER erase the Dream, Poetry, and Culture from the peoples of any nation; dreams or utopias that are inherent in the human soul and that are the true driving force, often the only one, that gives us the pleasure of living fully, with dignity and awareness the life we have been given.

In short: a dignified but dispensable film.