Film

Don Quixote (1957)

Director: Grigori Kozintsev

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Like Kozintsev's Hamlet and King Lear, this is a marvellously sensitive adaptation of a notoriously difficult classic text. Of course, Cervantes' epic has been curtailed and condensed so that it focuses on the picaresque odyssey of Quixote and Sancho Panza, rather than on the countless tales with which the author parodied chivalric literature. But it's absolutely faithful in spirit: not only are the arid Spanish plains admirably evoked by the Crimean locations (with Moskvin's masterly 'Scope camerawork weaving its own magic spell), but Cherkassov (Eisenstein's Nevsky and Ivan) and Tolubeyev are magnificent, respectively, as the gangly, naive and idealistic knight errant and his loyal friend and servant. Witty, elegant and touching.

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