Pour Don Carlos was the biggest production by Société des Films Musidora (est. December 10, 1919). Based on a novel by Pierre Benoît, Musidora’s first creatively autonomous work is set during the conflict between Carlists and Bourbons in late 19th century Spain. Benoît insisted that Jacques Lasseyne, a Spanish grandee who put money into the production, should co-direct. The film was shot in 1920, in the Spanish Basque Country. It represents a turning point in Musidora’s career, sparking her passionate love affair with a country and a culture that welcomed her as a great star. Above all, though, she encountered Antonio Cañero, a bullfighter who acted as her technical adviser on the film. Because of him, she did all she could to ensure that her succeeding productions, until 1926, were shot in Spain. Pour Don Carlos was released in Paris and in Madrid in December 1921, in a shortened version because its original, three-hour length made it impossible to release in the market of the time. (Marién Gómez Rodríguez for Il Cinema Ritrovato)
Pour Don Carlos, produced by Les Films Musidora, was released in France on the 16th of December 1921. Only two tinted nitrate copies of this film have survived: a distribution copy of the French version, incomplete, conserved by the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, and a working copy of the foreign version, incomplete and lacking the intertitles, from the collections of the Cinémathèque française. This version also contains different shots and alternative takes.
The reconstruction of the film primarily employed the copy of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, which was was beginning to break down, pulled from the original negative of the French version, which has since been lost. Several sequences that were missing or too degraded were taken from the foreign version. Twenty-two intertitles missing from the Toulouse copy have been reconstructed thanks to script documents from the Musidora archive, which resides in the holdings of the Cinémathèque française. The two copies have both been scanned in 4K and stabilized in Hiventy’s laboratory. Image restoration was undertaken at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Calibration and the reproduction of the tinting were carried out in Hiventy’s laboratory.