By RAY KELLY
With the possible exception of Chimes at Midnight, no film was perhaps more close to Orson Welles’ heart than Don Quixote, a project he shot on-and-off from 1955 through 1972 and continued to edit in the years before his death.
A self-funded endeavor, Welles made it clear it was “my own personal project, to be completed in my own time, as one might with a novel.”
At the time of his death in 1985, Welles was still discussing doing more filming for Don Quixote, even though its stars, Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff, had already passed away.
It was one of a dozen uncompleted efforts he bequeathed to Oja Kodar, though the materials were in several different hands when he died.
In April 1992, Don Quijote de Orson Welles arrived — though not in a form that pleased those closest to Welles.
Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen and director Jesus Franco, who had worked on Chimes at Midnight, released the film using footage obtained from Kodar and others, but not key materials held by Italian film editor Mauro Bonanni. (Kodar reportedly licensed the footage to raise funds for her family in war-torn Yugoslavia.) In addition, footage shot by Welles for the RAI Italian TV series La Spagna di Don Chisciotte (In the Land of Don Quixote) was tossed into the mix.
The result was a disjointed mess with few admirers. Variety labeled it a “travesty” and The New Yorker called it “crude, gappy, and slapdash.”
I spoke briefly with Kodar immediately after a screening of Franco’s Don Quijote de Orson Welles at the Museum of Modern Art in New York nearly 30 years ago. She was quite emotional and clearly distressed by what had just played on the screen.
The filmmaker’s youngest daughter, Beatrice Welles, has cited the Franco cut as an example why she distrusts efforts to reedit or complete her father’s films. In an online chat with Wellesnet readers in 2015, she stated, “the Quixote that we are able to see is not one my father’s name should even be connected to. It’s a disgrace.”
Juan Cobos, a close friend of Welles who worked with him on Chimes at Midnight and a rough edit of Don Quixote in the 1960s, was equally upset with Franco’s Don Quijote de Orson Welles.
“Not even in our worst nightmares could we imagine what we saw on April 20, 1992 in the open-air hall of the Seville Expo on Isla de la Cartuja,” Cobos wrote. “The audacity had been total… this version in fairness should have been titled Don Quixote: A Montage by Jesus Franco on Materials from the Unfinished Orson Welles Film.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, a respected Welles scholar with a keen appreciation of Don Quixote, has written that the 1992 film “did more to mutilate and distort Welles’s material than anyone had ever done to The Magnificent Ambersons or Mr. Arkadin, much less to The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, or Touch of Evil.
Don Quijote de Orson Welles was released on DVD in Europe and the United States more than a decade ago. It is no longer available to stream on Amazon Prime, though unlicensed copies can be found on YouTube and elsewhere.
Fifty years after Welles finished shooting scenes for Don Quixote and 30 years since the release of the disastrous Franco cut, Welles’ vision of Cervantes’ knight errant remains very much out of reach.
The decades-long legal battle between Kodar and Bonanni over the footage ended in 2017 with the negative being handed over to Kodar. Some of the footage shot by Welles is also in the collections of the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, Cinémathèque Française in Paris and Pordenone’s Cinemazero in Italy.
Since then, Wellesnet has heard rumblings of various European parties interested in tackling a completion or perhaps a documentary using all of the known footage, but no deals have yet to be reached.
Unlike The Other Side of the Wind, which Welles asked colleague Peter Bogdanovich to complete in the event of his death, Don Quixote was not a project Welles expressed a desire to see completed by others.
“I have two main projects which are unfinished. One is The Other Side of the Wind and when I tell you that my partner in that project is the brother-in-law of the late Shaw of Iran, you will understand why we are having a little legal difficulty,” he told an audience during Filming The Trial in 1981. “The other unfinished film is Don Quixote, which was a private exercise of mine, and it will be finished as an author would finish it — in my own good time, when I feel like it. It is not unfinished because of financial reasons. And when it is released, its title is going to be When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?”
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