Don Quixote (unfinished Film) - Don Quijote de Orson Welles By Jesus Franco

Don Quijote De Orson Welles By Jesus Franco

In 1990, Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen and director Jesús Franco acquired the rights to some of the extant footage of the Don Quixote project. Material was provided to them by numerous sources including Oja Kodar, the Croatian actress who was Welles' mistress and collaborator in his later years, and Suzanne Cloutier, the Canadian actress who played Desdemona in Welles' film version of Othello. In his will, Welles left Kodar the rights to all his unfinished film projects (including Don Quixote) and she was keen to see it completed. She spent the late 1980s touring Europe in a camper van with her Don Quixote footage, and approached several notable directors to complete the project. All of them declined for various reasons - except Franco. Franco seemed a logical choice, as he had worked as Welles' Second Unit Director on his Chimes at Midnight.

However, Irigoyen and Franco were unable to obtain the footage with McCormack, which included a scene where Don Quixote destroys a movie screen that is showing a film of knights in battle. This footage, along with all footage featuring Patty McCormack, was held by Italian film editor Mauro Bonanni (who had worked on the film in Rome in 1969), who was engaged in a legal dispute with Kodar over the rights to the film. He refused to allow its incorporation into the Irigoyen-Franco project, although he would later permit some scenes to be shown on Italian television. As a consequence of this litigation between Kodar and Bonanni, Kodar insisted that none of the footage with Patty McCormck should be used.

Irigoyen and Franco faced several problems in putting the Welles footage together. Welles had worked in three different formats – 35mm, 16mm and Super 16mm – which created inconsistent visual quality. The wildly varying storage conditions of this footage had further exacerbated the variable visual quality. The lack of a screenplay also hampered efforts. Welles recorded less than an hour's soundtrack where he read a narration and provided dialogue for the main characters, but the rest of the footage was silent. A new script was created by Franco and voiceover actors were brought in to fill the silence left by Welles’ incomplete work, although their impressions of Welles' narration and Welles' Quixote/Sancho Panza voices were far from convincing, especially when intercut with the original recordings. Joseph McBride refers to the soundtrack of Franco's version as "an off-putting melange of dubbed voices." A further controversy was the inclusion by Franco of footage of Welles filming in Spain, taken from a documentary he had made on Spain in the 1960s. Welles had not intended to appear in the film himself, other than in its framing scenes as the narrator, and yet the Irigoyen/Franco film features several scenes with Quixote and Sancho Panza on Spanish streets, with Welles apparently looking on. Additionally, Franco inserts a windmill scene into the film, even though Welles had not filmed one or ever intended to film one - the scene relies on footage of Quixote charging across plains, interspersed with windmill images (which were not filmed by Welles), zooms and jump cuts.

Furthermore, Welles feared a repetition of the experience of having the film re-edited by someone else (as had happened to him on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), so he divided up all the reels of film for Don Quixote and deliberately mislabelled many of them, telling Mauro Bonanni, "If someone finds them, they mustn't understand the sequence, because only I know that."

The Irigoyen and Franco work premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival as Don Quixote de Orson Welles, with English and Spanish language versions produced. Initial reaction was predominantly negative, and this version was never theatrically released in the U.S. In September 2008, a U.S. DVD edition was released as Orson Welles' Don Quixote by Image Entertainment. The footage of Don Quixote in the cinema that is in Bonanni's possession has turned up on YouTube.

Spanish film critic Juan Cobos saw a rough cut of Welles' unfinished footage (which he praised very highly), and stated that the 1992 edit by Franco bore little resemblance to it. Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the 45 minutes of footage assembled in 1986 as being vastly superior to the Franco edit.