El Cid (Samuel Bronston; Allied Artists). Don Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, Spain's greatest military genius, was born circa 1043 of noble yet obscure descent. Nevertheless, so extraordinary were Don Rodrigo's courage and character that at 28 he became commander in chief of the armies of Castile. Not for long. The able but treacherous King Alfonso VI, jealous of his vassal's victories and virtues, banished him. Undaunted, Don Rodrigo gathered an army of admirers, and off and on for 30 years beat back the Moslem armies. Though generally far outnumbered, he never lost a battle, and did more than any man of his time to rescue Spain from the Moors. In fear and trembling, they called him "al Seid" (the Lord).
El Cid (as he is known in Spanish transliteration) was a great soul as well as a great soldier. "This man," wrote a Moslem chronicler, "was by his clear-eyed force, his strength of spirit and heroism, a miracle of the Almighty."
Fearless and teal, pious and pitying, cunning and courteous, he was a paragon of chivalry and the mold of Spanish manhood. He became a legend in his lifetime, and some 40 years after his death in 1099 he was celebrated in El Poema de Mio Cid—a vast rambling rime that became the national epic—as the Lancelot of Spain and something more, as a sort of Round Table of one.
Ballads by the bushel have since embellished the fame of El Cid. Pierre Corneille made him the hero of France's first great play, Le Cid. Jules Massenet turned the play into an opera. And now Samuel Bronston. who recently made an appalling spectacle of the life of Christ (King of Kings), has produced the first film version of the legend. Inevitably, the picture is colossal—it runs three hours and 15 minutes (including intermission), cost $6,200,000, employs an extra-wide widescreen, a special color process, 7,000 extras, 10,000 costumes, 35 ships, 50 outsize engines of medieval war, and four of the noblest old castles in Spain: Ampudia, Belmonte, Peñiscola and Torrelobaton. Surprisingly, the picture is good—maybe not as good as Ben-Hur, but anyway better than any spectacle since Spartacus (TIME, Oct. 24. 1960).
To begin with, Philip Yordan has written a screenplay that makes an educated exegesis of the legend and plenty of dramatic sense. For the first few reels. Yordan pretty much follows the plot of Corneille's play. Don Rodrigo (Charlton Heston), betrothed to Jimena (Sophia Loren). is forced by the code of chivalry to kill her father in defense of his own father's honor. Jimena. in turn, though she loves Rodrigo madly, is forced to seek revenge. So much for Corneille. From there out, Yordan collects vivid scraps of incident from the teeming, demi-mythological Matter of Spain, and patches together an opulent tapestry of medieval legend. In its final moment, the film rises to a vision of chilling weirdness as El Cid. strapped dead to his great white steed Babieca, looms above the field of his last dim battle and, scattering the heathen like smoke before the gale of destiny, rides thundering into Aceldama and the ages.