Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 31, 1934

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Don Quixote (Nelson Film, Ltd., Vandor Film). The wild mountain land above the French Riviera and Paris and London studios more than two years ago began to spawn rumors about this picture. French Novelist Paul Morand had written its scenario from the Cervantes classic. The producers had thrown out the musical jello which Composer Jules Massenet provided in his opera Don Quichotte, had commissioned new tunes from Jacques Ibert, able pupil of Maurice Ravel. George Wilhelm Pabst, exiled German Jew famed for his Kameradschaft, The Beggar's Opera and White Hell of Pitz Palu, was directing two versions, one in French, the other in English. In both versions Russian Basso Feodor Chaliapin was playing and singing the Caballero de la Triste Figura. He was getting $200,000. To look more like the lank old knight he had dieted and exercised to reduce his barrel figure. Spectators on location noted that the fastidious singer-actor Flitted daily the ribby old horse playing his steed Rosinante (TIME, Nov. 21, 1932).

Last week Don Quixote in English finally reached the U. S. Critics found it lively, visually beautiful, well acted by Chaliapin and a predominantly British cast including jovial old (65) George Robey, music-hall comedian. The pathos of the hero, however, choked off many a laugh at his comic doings.

First sound of the deep rackety bass of Chaliapin is when, in a cobwebby garret, the witling Don carols a Spanish song and puts on a battered suit of armor. He has driven his niece (Sidney Fox) and her ninny of a fiance to despair by selling all his possessions to buy a library of chivalric romances. He sallies forth, enters a tavern where strolling players are performing. Vastly amused, they dub him knight. He swears fealty to his Dulcinea —a tavern wench. Arousing his trusty Sancho Panza (Robey) from bed, the old knight drags him off on a career of errantry. Dreamy, hollow-eyed, grandiloquent, Don Quixote perpetually fancies he is dealing with giants or magicians. His bewildered but eager squire does his best to help and coddle the old zany. After the Don has attacked a flock of sheep the pair escape but when they incite a group of convicts to rebel, they not only get themselves badly stoned but end up in the hands of the local duke. This gentleman seeks to pacify the Don by humoring his delusions. The old Knight of the Mournful Countenance, however, detects a slight, wanders off once more to joust with windmills, returns home to find his books ablaze and to die. Photographed by Nicolas Farkas, who directed The Battle (TIME, Dec. 3), Don Quixote is at its best when it is purely pictorial—the brilliant whites and gloomy greys of Spain; the noble nose, the gaunt cheek, the scraggly whiskers of the Don whose addled pate wears a barber's lather-bowl which he thinks is a helmet; the whirling windmills seen from a dozen different angles after the poor Don is impaled on one of them by his own spear. Notable is the picture's end. Off-screen Chaliapin sings morosely, while the camera catches pattern after pattern in the twisting, writhing pages of his burning books. Here Is My Heart (Paramount). Cinemaddicts who remember that brilliant picture, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, in which Adolphe Menjou performed in