Friday, April 27, 2012



The Characters of "Ten Blocks on the Camino Real"
 
Don Quixote is the title character of a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. Alonso Quijano is a retired country gentleman of fifty years of age, living in La Mancha, Spain. While mostly a rational man of sound reason, his excessive reading of books of chivalry has had a profound effect on him, leading to the distortion of his perception and the wavering of his mental faculties. In essence, he believes every word of these books of chivalry to be true though their content is clearly fiction. He decides to go out as a knight-errant in search of adventure. He dons an old suit of armour, renames himself "Don Quixote de la Mancha," and names his skinny horse "Rocinante". Don Quixote approaches his neighbor, Sancho Panza, a simple farmer, and asks him to be his squire, promising him governorship of an island. The uneducated Sancho agrees, and the pair sneak off in the early dawn. It is here that their series of famous adventures begin, starting with Don Quixote's attack on windmills that he believes to be ferocious giants.
 
Esmeralda is a fictional character in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. She is a French Gypsy girl who attracts men with her seductive dances, and is rarely seen without her clever goat. She is around 16 years old. When she spurns the repeated advances of the Archdeacon of Notre Dame he uses her trained goat's apparent ability to count to accuse her of witchcraft. She is jailed and eventually hung as a witch.
 
Mr. Gutman, The Proprietor of the Sieta Mares Hotel is based on two film characters, both of them played by British character actor Sidney Greenstreet in classic Warner Bros. films of the 1940's. Visually, he closely resembles Signor Ferrari in CASABLANCA, owner of the Blue Parrot cafe, a major underworld figure and Rick's (Humphrey Bogart) friendly business rival, but a fairly minor player in the film's events. Gutman's name and nature are more closely modelled after Kasper Gutman, the major role Greenstreet played to perfection in THE MALTESE FALCON. Gutman will do anything to acquire the titular statue, including selling out his associates.
 
Adapted from Wikipedia.
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