Don Quixote (1999)

Director

• Peter Yates

Starring

• Bob Hoskins
• John Lithgow
• Vanessa Williams
• Isabella Rossellini
• James Purefoy

Last On

12:15-15:15 Sat 27th Feb 2010 190m
Five US

Synopsis

Although John Cleese and Robin Williams were once linked with a big screen adaptation of Cervantes's classic satire, it's John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins who headline Peter Yates's marathon TV feature. Lithgow is quite magnificent in a role he'd long hoped to play. Admirably quixotic and suitably gauche to pull off the physical comedy, he invites genuine pathos as the delusional knight whose undimmed sense of chivalry is responsible for sending devoted squire Sancho Panza in search of challenges to please the fair Dulcinea. The Spanish locations are exploited to the full, but Yates finds no solution to the fragmentary nature of the novel. He's in good company - Orson Welles spent much of his life trying to bring it to the big screen and failed.