El Cid Details

Although initially seen as an invincible weapon in the battle against television, the historical epic had earned itself a bad name with audiences, critics and studio executives alike by the time this lavish account of the life and times of Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar reached cinema screens. While not perhaps in the same class as The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur, the film gave Charlton Heston another chance to carry the weight of a nation on his shoulders, this time as he takes on the Moors who had occupied parts of Spain for 300 years. Director Anthony Mann avoids the history-lesson style that confounded many a blockbuster, but, as well as he handles the feud between the Cid and his estranged wife (Sophia Loren) and the political intrigues at court, he is outdone by Yakima Canutt (the legendary stunt man and western villain) who led the second-unit crew responsible for the battle scenes; 35 full-scale ships and 5,000 extras were used for the final siege, which was breathtakingly staged. With Miklos Rozsa's superlative, Oscar-nominated score booming in the background, a literate script by Philip Yordan and Fredric M Frank (with an uncredited contribution from blacklisted writer Ben Barzman) and outstanding support from Herbert Lom, John Fraser and Genevieve Page, this is Hollywood at its spectacular best.

One of the very finest epics produced by Samuel Bronston, equally impressive in terms of script (by Philip Yordan, who... read more on Time Out