I’ve seen a lot of Hollywood epics of this era and liked many of them. This three-hour long slog is not one.

“El Cid” deals with eleventh century Spain, where Rodrigo de Vivar (Charlton Helston) gets into trouble for being nice to some Moorish princes he had taken prisoner in a battle. He has them swear to not take up arms against the king and lets them go. This gets him accused of treason, because Christians weren’t supposed to be merciful to Muslims. The lady Jimena (Sophia Loren) is his fiancé, but this becomes problematic when her dad forbids her to marry Rodrigo (because of the treason thing), insults Rodrigo’s dad (Michael Hordern), and is killed by Rodrigo in a fight. Jimena ends up married to Rodrigo anyway by order of the king, acts like she hates him (though she really doesn’t) and then he gets banished by insisting the new king Alfonso swear on the Bible in public that he didn’t have anything to do with the death of his older brother (he did.) Jimena decides she loves him after all at this point. The story skips ten years, all the love-hate thing gets sidelined for an invasion of Moors from Africa and the threat to Spain!!! Melodrama abounds.

The movie starts with what ends up being something of a head-scratcher. Ben Yussuf, the head of the African invaders (Herbert Lom), appears near the start of the movie, berating some of the Spanish emirs for not being strong enough in their attacks on the Christians. He visits one of them, who rules the city of Vandalucia (Frank Thring in a typically slimy bad guy role), telling him to hold the city because Ben Yussuf will be landing his ships there and they will need the city on their side. The problem is that there is a ten year gap in the middle of this film – why does this planned invasion not occur until ten years later?  This is glossed over, and would have been a lot better if the script had worked into one of the conversations some reason for this long delay.

Speaking of the script, it is very clunky and stilted. The end result is that it is very hard to sense any real feelings about the situation from any of the characters. They are all written very two-dimensionally. There is a lot of declaiming and loud proclamations of pride and honour and all the stuff that nobility of the time-period are supposed to talk about (according to Hollywood) but there is no real sense of real emotion underneath all of that. The whole film seems very shallow, all style and no substance.

There is the always uncomfortable aspect of actors in brown-face, entirely typical for the period but nonetheless has not aged well. Other than the reluctance of film studios of the time to put non-white actors into main roles, one aspect of this that has always confused me is that they never look realistic. Apparently, there was no makeup person who was capable of making a white person look convincingly Arabic. They seemed to think that just colouring a person’s skin brown would do the trick. All it does is make the actors stick out like a sore thumb. It’s very cringe inducing for today’s audience.

The romantic leads, Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, are not convincing lovers. They have no real chemistry on screen and frankly often seem to be going through the motions. I have seen both these actors in many films where they do good work, but here they just don’t click at all. Again, I think the script doesn’t help them. Declarative dialogue doesn’t really make for passionate scenes.

Even the fight and battle scenes aren’t very convincing, which is something of a surprise. Hollywood of this era had some films with amazing sword fights in them, but these were very clumsy looking. Where are Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn when you need them?

The big battle scenes weren’t much better. Maybe I have been spoiled by the slicker production values of more modern films, but the battle scenes in this just looked bad, with a lot of guys in costumes running around yelling and hacking at each other with no real sense that they had ever used a sword before in their lives. The archers were more convincing, but on the whole, I found it very hard to immerse myself in the movie with this lack of smooth choreography.  

Then there is the big finale, when the dead El Cid is fastened on top of his horse, held upright by some kind of metal brace, and is galloped out at the head of the troops to provide morale. There are a couple of points here – a horse won’t keep galloping if it is not being directed to. It might if it was scared ie of the battle, but that horse looked like it was just cantering along. Also, to be frank the entire scene looked vaguely comical. At the end the horse is galloping along the seashore like it’s going to gallop off into the sunset never to be seen again. I wondered if anyone cared to retrieve it, to give their hero a proper burial and give the poor horse a break.

The music was quite bombastic on the whole, with attempts at a Spanish theme to make it more convincing. If you watch a lot of costume dramas of the era you will be used to this type of music. However, the choir and organ music at the end seemed quite out of place, more in keeping with Biblical epics than historical ones.

On a kinder note, the film was visually attractive. Robert Krasker, director of cinematography, gave us brilliant costumes, convincing sets and stunning locations. There is also a note of interest in the plot, where, after besieging Valencia, El Cid’s troops use the catapults to throw bread over the walls into the city. This starts a riot among the starving populace, allowing the attackers to take control. Clever, and unexpected.  

“El Cid” is not, in my opinion, a good movie. It’s a long time to spend watching something that could easily have been done in a shorter run time and with a better result. It’s like the makers of the movie set out to make an epic, rather than to make a film about the story. If you wish to see Charlton Heston in a big budget Hollywood epic of the time, I recommend “Ben Hur”, “The 10 Commandments”, or “Khartoum”, rather than “El Cid.”