The wine was picked up from the local Co-operative on the edge of town, which continues to perform this vital function decades later. The arguments between the priest and the communist cannot hide the fact that their common humanity and decency, as well as a few well chosen bottles of wine, bring them closer together than can the trappings of belief.

However, as is so often the case with Greene, the real story is one of faith and an attempt to see Catholicism in a modern context. Quixote and Sancho head off in a battered old Seat 600 car, called, inevitably, ‘Rocinante,’ and although there is no damsel in distress, their story runs parallel to the original Quijote. The car is taken to a garage, a real one as it happens, situated in Calle Los Bancos 2.

Monseñor Quixote becomes a Monseñor because of a favour he does for an Italian cleric, whose car runs out of petrol. The interiors however were shot at Calle Adolfo Lorenzo 14. The eave over the ground floor window was added by film-makers to facilitate Alec Guinness’s escape, when he climbs down from his bedroom. The exteriors were shot in a house in the main square opposite the church. The house where Monseñor Quixote lives was actually two different houses during filming. The story is updated and is set in the village of El Toboso, Toledo, with Quixote a non-conformist priest at loggerheads with his Bishop, and Sancho (Leo McKern), a Communist who has just been voted out of his job as Mayor in the early years of post-Franco Spain.įilming took place in the real El Toboso, a village with an impressive museum dedicated to the Spanish bard.Įarly on we see the Mayor leaving the Town Hall mumbling about betrayal, and the building he steps out of is in fact El Toboso’s Town Hall today. Monsignor Quixote is a novel by Graham Greene, based on ‘Don Quijote,’ made into a television film released in 1987, with a screenplay written in part by Greene and starring Alec Guinness as Father Quixote, a ‘genuine’ ancestor of the fictional character created by Cervantes.

The TV film Monsignor Quixote was Alec Guinness’s last Spanish movie, and the only one in fact about Spain.

Monsignor quixote 1987