Celluloid Castles in Spain

The best thing that can be said about El Cid is that as a screen epic it is not as bad as it might have been —or, indeed, as I had anticipated. This is really saying a lot when one considers that the producer, Samuel Bronston, and the “creative head of the Bronston story department” Philip Yordan were basically responsible for it, since these two were also responsible for the cowboy Christ of The King of Kings. The fact that the more egregious errors of taste and the more blatant sportshirt embroideries on the original legend have been avoided is due no doubt to Dr. Gonzalo Menendez Pidal. Dr. Pidal, son of the great scholar and interpreter of the Cid to the modern world, by serving as historical and literary adviser, has kept a restraining if uneasy hand on the Bronston-Yordan exuberances.

The result is a two-dimensional pageant—a super-circus come to town. As a spectacle it manages often to be quite splendid, with gorgeous costumes and settings, hundreds of horsemen, thousands of soldiers in aluminum armor, maidenform maidens, and black-robed Moorish warriors thundering along the beach. And of course the background of the Spanish countryside is superb, particularly the austere upland landscape of the Guadarrama Mountains. Other parts of the picture were shot in Valladolid and La Mancha, and the old walled city of Peniscola was used as the setting for the Cid’s assault on Valencia. I for one would have been quite content to have dispensed with both story and actors just to have watched a three-hour wide-screen travelogue of Spain in Super-Technirama.

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Francis Russell

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The best thing that can be said about El Cid is that as a screen epic it is not as bad as it might have been —or, indeed, as I had anticipated. This is really saying a lot when one considers that the producer, Samuel Bronston, and the “creative head of the Bronston story department” Philip Yordan were basically responsible for it, since these two were also responsible for the cowboy Christ of The King of Kings. The fact that the more egregious errors of taste and the more blatant sportshirt embroideries on the original legend have been avoided is due no doubt to Dr. Gonzalo Menendez Pidal. Dr. Pidal, son of the great scholar and interpreter of the Cid to the modern world, by serving as historical and literary adviser, has kept a restraining if uneasy hand on the Bronston-Yordan exuberances.

The result is a two-dimensional pageant—a super-circus come to town. As a spectacle it manages often to be quite splendid, with gorgeous costumes and settings, hundreds of horsemen, thousands of soldiers in aluminum armor, maidenform maidens, and black-robed Moorish warriors thundering along the beach. And of course the background of the Spanish countryside is superb, particularly the austere upland landscape of the Guadarrama Mountains. Other parts of the picture were shot in Valladolid and La Mancha, and the old walled city of Peniscola was used as the setting for the Cid’s assault on Valencia. I for one would have been quite content to have dispensed with both story and actors just to have watched a three-hour wide-screen travelogue of Spain in Super-Technirama.