21:00 - Teatro Verdi Pordenone
Opening Event
DON Q SON OF ZORRO (US 1925; 107 min)
by Donald Crisp with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor
Score commissioned by Slovenska kinoteka, composed and conducted by Andrej Goričar, performed by the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra

Don Q Son of Zorro is Douglas Fairbanks' forgotten blockbuster. The story, involving a handsome (and characteristically cheery) American student, sent to Spain to round out his education, was derived from the pulp novel “Don Q's Love Story", written by Kate Prichard and her son Hesketh Prichard. Fairbanks simply shoehorned the character of Zorro into the plot as the hero's American father. Armed with his wits (and wicked whip skills), young Don Cesar eludes a false charge of murdering a visiting archduke, woos the beautiful daughter of a General (who unwittingly plans her marriage to the actual murderer), and, staging a fake suicide, becomes Don Q, an avenger cloaked in mystery and justice.
The film is a lot of fun: Fairbanks weaves his way through the elegant drapery, woos the fair lass, cracks his whip, and in general raises sunny hell. "Doug has never leaped so high, moved so quickly or kept in such constant motion so long before. The man isn't human, that's what he isn't. He's perpetual youth, a three-ringed circus, the personification of all juvenile heroes, all rolled into one…" wrote W. Ward Marsh in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (19.10.1925).
Until now, the only available copies of Don Q were badly damaged 16mm prints. The Danish Film Institute's beautiful new restoration returns the film to its original luster of a century ago.