AllMovie

This Spanish cinemazation of Cervantes' Don Quixote may well have cost more money than any previous adaptation of that literary classic. Rafael Rivelles stars as the ageing, windmill-tilting knight-errant, while Juan Calvo plays Quixote's faithful manservant Sancho Panza. In fact, it is Calvo's sure-handed comic performance that keeps this elephantine production afloat. At 138 minutes, the film proved too much of a good thing for American filmgoers, many of whom were probably still resentful that they'd been force-fed Cervantes in high-school Spanish Class. Herman G. Weinberg, a film critic and historian best known for his essays on director Ernst Lubitsch, wrote the English-language subtitles for Don Quixote de la Mancha.