THE MAN FROM LA MANCHA

Here is something you almost certainly did not know.  Pascale Christine Baeriswyl of Switzerland is now President of the United Nations Security Council.  Do you know who she replaced?  Vasily Nebenzia, Russia's ambassador to the UN.  Somehow, the World survived his month in office.  Another thing you did not know.  This position changes monthly.  

Surely you must know that the ninth Secretary-General of the UN, who took office in 2017, is Antonio Guterres of Portugal.  But if this position is for 5 years, why is he still in office?  Because you can get a second term.  So he's good until the end of 2026.

Next, a graphic from the morning New York Times.  The previous Great Recession was from December 2007 to June 2009. The U.S. GDP did not recover until the third quarter of 2011.  Unemployment rose to 10% in October of 2009 and took until May of 2016 to drop back to 4.7%.  The NYT article nowhere hints about any coming 2008 recession, but....

I woke up this morning to the final scene from the 1933 film, The Adventures of Don Quixote, which depicted life during the Spanish Inquisition.  Of course I'm familiar with the whole story, but as I thought about the subject, the music and everything else, my mind could not remember any real details.  So I decided to focus this nostalgic Tuesday on the subject.

The 1933 film:

• Was based on what is considered to be the first true novel, by Miguel de Cervantes, and released in two parts, 1605 and 1615.  While he has been touted as the greatest Spanish writer, he only knew poverty, obscurity and worse, for he was captured by Barbary pirates in 1575, and after five years in captivity, was ransomed.  Most of his works never were found.  The story well reflected his life.  He died in 1616, the day before William Shakespeare.
• 
  Movie was made in three versions, French, English and German, starring the great Russian operatic singer Feodor Chaliapin.  To feature his voice, four songs were commissioned for the soundtrack.
• There are more than a dozen You Tube links, most of them the full movie.  The English one is only 55 minutes long, while the French with Spanish subtitles is 1 hour and 21 minutes long.  Why?  Don't know.
• The film lost so much money that Nelson Films collapsed.

I tried to count how many film variations there were, but failed.  Here is a research article by J.A. Garrido of all the Don Quixote films only from 2005-2015, and he found 68 productions across 20 countries, led by the USA with 22 shows and Spain with 17.  (https://www.degruyter.com >culture-2017-0018>pdf)  Walt Disney attempted to animate the show in 1940, 1946, 1951, and into the 1990's, but couldn't.

Yet another failure.  Don Quixote is also the unfinished film project of Orson Welles.  He worked on it from 1955, almost completed it in 1975, but died in 1985.  He wanted Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the modern age.  First used Mischa Auer as DQ and Akim Tamiroff as SP.  CBS was unhappy and the project got shelved.  Welles then got $25,000 from Frank Sinatra to make a black-and-white feature.  

Again, nothing good happened.  There were several attempts to package a real product since then.  There is a nearly two-hour  black and white film in You Tube.

The best is said to be the 1957 Russian version, the first color production.  Yet, Rotten Tomatoes gave 43/39 scores.  Said:

This assemblage of Welles' footage by Jess Franco, from 1992, is crude, gappy, and slapdash, but it hardly matters: the pathos of Welles's thinly veiled self-portrait is almost unbearable.

March 11, 2013 | Full Review…

But, whoops, Rotten Tomatoes screwed up.  They are reviewing one of those Orson Welles re-hashes mentioned in the paragraph above.  I can't seem to find much on the 1957 Russian version.

The 1965 broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, (this is the full 143-minute original Broadway show) followed a book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion.  This story is not faithful to the original novel.  Won five Tony Awards, including best musical.  Original Cervantes/Don Quixote was to be Rex Harrrison, but he was too busy with My Fair Lady.  Instead, Richard Kiley won a Tony.  During the first production, the C/DQ role was also played by José Ferrer, Hall Holbrook and Lloyd Bridges.  Has been revived four times, but the last one was in 2002, so should be back soon, although a London West End production in 2019 starred Kelsey Grammar as C/DQ.  National tours starred Hal Linden and Robert Goulet.  A studio recording was released in 1996 with Placido Domingo as DQ and Mandy Patinkin as SP.

The movie I most identified with was the 1972 Man of La Mancha, with Peter O'Toole as C/DQ, voice dubbed by Simon Gilbert, James Coco as Sancho Panza and Sophia Loren as Dulcinea/Aldonza.  Shot in Rome.  It was a troubled production with a range of directors and screenwriters.  Rotten Tomatoes gave 47/71 scores.

The Impossible Dream has long been my theme song, as the final portion of this posting indicates.  The movie was released just a few years before I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, soon followed by my stint at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion, then on to the U.S. Senate to draft the original version of the hydrogen legislation.  

Here is Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle shocking the TV viewing world in 1967 with his rendition on the night this episode played.  Led to his singing career.  Might have been the best ever, although Jack Jones hit #1 on the Adult Billboard Chart in 1966, Robert Goulet in 1967, Placido Domingo in 1996, hundreds of others, and more recently, Jackie Evancho (see her growing older and older), Susan Boyle (with lyrics) and Josh Groban in 2020.

There was a 2-hour TV Don Quixote in 2000 starring John Lithgow as DQ and Bob Hoskins as SP, with Vanessa Williams as Dulcinea.  However, Rotten Tomatoes audiences gave it a 37 score.

Terry Gilliam produced the 2002 documentary, Lost in La Mancha.  He had attempted this effort as early as 1991, but it took him more than two decades to succeed...and he failed.  Yes, there was this documentary, but he protested.  Jeff Bridges was narrator and Johnny Depp played Don Quixote.  Rotten Tomatoes gave 94/77 scores.  

16 years later Gilliam followed through with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Adam Driver, and Jonathan Pryce as Don Quixote, which only got 66/60 ratings from Rotten Tomatoes.  It's not over....yet. 

In 2019 came He Dreams of Giants, a follow-up to the 2002 documentary.  This one starred Terry Gilliam, Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce.  Rotten Tomatoes:  reviewers gave a 90% rating.  No audience score.  Why?  This trio would make a fine triple-bill one night.

Finally, in 2019, The True Don Quixote, directed by Chris Poche, which got a 94 audience rating from Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of them all.  Tim Blake Nelson is DQ and Jacob Batalon is SP.  Filmed in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, it is a modern-day adaptation.

So why spend all this time on a delusional paranoid?  In a way, Don Quixote reminds me of me.  From a 2015 blog:

Why have I always related to the Man from La Mancha?  For one, like him, I have spent much of my life tilting at windmills.  I actually was chairman of the Wind Energy Division of the American Solar Energy Society just around the time the movie was produced.  The song, The Impossible Dream, has driven me to do what I have accomplished, which is not much, because everything of substance I try is almost impossible to do. 

Eight years ago I also posted on THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM IS 50 YEARS OLD.  To quote:

• 
  I used the caricature of Don Quixote on the cover of my proposal to NASA to build PAT (Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer), and called the project, To See the Impossible Dream.  Bad choice, for the reviewers thought I was not being serious enough. 

During the final few months of 2020 I counted down my 100 favorite songs. I daily started at #100 and worked my way down to #1.  While Impossible Dream, was only #63, it represents the story of my life.

My problem is that my impossible dreams have thus far been impossible to engineer into reality:

• Coffee that TASTES as good as it smells.
• Rainbow Pearls
• Hawaiian Onsen
• Blue Revolution
• Direct methanol fuel cell
• Hydrogen economy

However, someday, someone will gain fame and wealth with those dreams of mine.  Why not you?

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