What we have here is essentially a debatable point: Is it better to see ANYTHING by Welles, even a travesty or should we resist the temptation to tamper and merely speculate on what might have been. There are, of course, precedents for offering uncompleted works by acknowledged masters - Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon springs to mind - and this, no doubt, influenced the decision in this case. I write as one who admires Welles enormously and with sadness because of what has been done to a project so dear to his heart and upon which he lavished so much care and attention. The only pluses on view are what amounts to little more than a handful of shots bearing the maestro's unmistakable signature, the sound is an atrocious hybrid and the whole has been strung out with extraneous footage of the running of the bulls and Panza's repititious soliciting of the crowd. In appearance the two leads could not be bettered and if only someone had spent five minutes matching sound to picture we WOULD be talking of a very near miss. As it is we are left with the impression that the footage was turned over to a devoted fan of Welles who had zero knowledge/experience of film-making, someone like Jean Luc Godard for example.
Review of Don Quixote
