Don Quixote (unfinished Film) - Television Project - Don Quixote Passes By

Don Quixote was initially conceived in 1955 as a 30-minute film for CBS entitled Don Quixote Passes By. Rather than offer a literal adaptation of the Miguel de Cervantes novel, Welles opted to bring the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age as living anachronisms. Welles explained his idea in an interview, stating: "My Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are exactly and traditionally drawn from Cervantes, but are nonetheless contemporary." Welles later elaborated to Peter Bogdanovich, "What interests me is the idea of these dated old virtues. And why they still seem to speak to us when, by all logic, they're so hopelessly irrelevant. That's why I've been obsessed for so long with Don Quixote... can't ever be contemporary - that's really the idea. He never was. But he's alive somehow, and he's riding through Spain even now...The anachronism of Don Quixote's knightly armor in what was Cervantes' own modern time doesn't show up very sharply now. I've simply translated the anachronism. My film demonstrates that he and Sancho Panza are eternal."

Welles shot colour test footage in the Bois de Boulogne with Russian-born American actor Mischa Auer as Don Quixote and Russian character actor Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza; Auer had previously acted in Welles' Mr. Arkadin, while Tamiroff had first worked with Welles on Black Magic, and had appeared in Welles' film Mr. Arkadin (and would appear in his later films Touch of Evil and The Trial). It was the first time Welles had filmed in colour since the ill-fated production of It's All True in 1942. However, representatives from CBS viewed unedited film and were unhappy with Welles' concept, cancelling the project. The original colour test shots with Auer were subsequently lost, and are no longer believed to exist.