EL CID
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
The era of the roadshow -- big budgeted movies designed to battle the rapid intrusion of television on box office receipts in the Fifties and Sixties -- was mostly a pompous affair: movies that were one or two hours longer than needed, elevated prices for reserved seats and refreshments (like BEN-HUR candy bars), mementos such as stagebills & souvenir booklets & sometimes glossy still packets, preludes, overtures, intermissions, exit music. Most of these nothing-money-can't-buy spectaculars, in spite of honorable intentions, weren't worth the trouble; they were mostly globs of lush sets, costumes, over-scored music, special effects demonstrations, ear-splitting sound, eye-popping panoramas -- reasons to spend money, to advance movie technology, to keep a lot of people working. What other reasons were there for Sam Bronston to make THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE? (But in Bronston's defense: his pre-Epcot Rome has never been equaled, though the pornographic CALIGULA has a few settings that come close, and Richard Fleischer's BARABBAS is so plausibly evocative of the period that its "realism" is out and out depressing.) Of all the epics that received the deluxe treatment, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's CLEOPATRA and George Steven's THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD were so badly butchered by executive fiat -- editing the movies down because of complaints by the few and for the additional purpose of trying to squeeze in more showings per day for more bucks -- that they have become objects of sympathy. (Fox's video of CLEOPATRA, even without letterboxing, might be the first quietly "restored" spectacle, yet Fox's two video releases of GREATEST STORY remain 65 minutes short of its original running time.) After the successful restoration of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, spearheaded by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and following the renovation of SPARTACUS, Scorsese set his sights on Anthony Mann's EL CID, considered by many lovers of the genre as its epitome. Most of Scorsese's push to restore these (and soon-to-be other) films has to do with the fear of losing the productions, as intended by their makers, to the destructive elements of time, environment and neglect on original negatives. As he said of EL CID, "They can't make them like this anymore." He guesstimated that the 1960-61 $14,000,000 cost of EL CID would approximate $129,000,000 in 1993 dollars. Probably an exaggerated figure, but producers reportedly spent something close to $80-to-100 million on the megabomb THE LAST ACTION HERO and something like $170 million on WATERWORLD, and some movie makers are trying get $100 million to make an epic on the Crusades (with Arnold!), so Scorsese's regrets should not be confused with future possibilities. What he's saying is movie makers most likely won't attempt to re-make a LAWRENCE or an EL CID again, and that's the strongest imperative behind the restorations.
When released in 1961, EL CID received some good reviews -- ending up on Time's and the N.Y. Times' "Ten Best" lists -- but it came nowhere near the domestic box office of BEN-HUR. It also met with unjust comparisons: looking at BEN-HUR today, there's such fraudulence -- crammed with faked backdrops, matte shots, obvious dummies on the miniature ships and in the galley, embarrassingly revealing bits of stand-ins for the principals -- that it becomes a hoot. (The 1926 BEN-HUR often more realistic, like that tempting bare-assed slave chained in the galley.) You wonder: What drove the masses to see it? Of course, the chariot race. And superb marketing, with equally grand art work, tailored to religious suck ups. (Every parochial school bused students downtown to Saturday morning showings, hoping they'd be mesmerized, overwhelmed, therefore resurrected by the solemn hymns; the hope being Hollywood could do in a few hours what the Church took years to do -- transforms the kids from sinners to angelic submissives.) Having but one splendid action sequence to grab and exhaust us -- the two-man battle for the city of Calahorra directed by second unit wizard Yakima Canutt (its other action scenes more than adequate, notwithstanding Heston's comments in his self-congratulatory 1978 THE ACTOR'S LIFE) -- EL CID had handicaps and prejudices to overcome. Coming on the heals of biblical stories like THE ROBE, QUO VADIS, BEN-HUR, SOLOMON AND SHEBA, THE BIG FISHERMAN and KING OF KINGS, another Bronston spectacle, EL CID suffered not only because it's an "old Hollywood style" epic, loaded down with pageantry, encased in stilted aphorisms much like KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE and IVANHOE, but also because it's an account of Spain's greatest hero about whom American audiences were neither aware of nor really cared about. EL CID is indeed propelled along by an extensive use of epigrams, and Loren delivers more of them than any other cast member. Her best: "Since my love is not like other men, my life will not be like other lives." (When Herbert Lom, the treacherous Emir Ben Yussuf, is berating his men as softies and the camera moves in on the indispensably nellie Frank Thring, he lashes out, "You have become women!") And "old fashion" in style it is: perfunctory scenes are used to advance the story along, there's pomp and clash & bang galore, the mandatory insertion of good over evil. But unlike other medieval epics, EL CID has been lavishly wrapped in authenticity: its sets are huge but subdued in scale and detail for the 11th Century. The restoration of color and clarity have given us the chance to ooh and aah at not only the tapestries, murals, flags and other regalia but the real leathers used in costumes for Heston and Raf Vallone: they're so vividly rich that you can practically reach out and touch the textures. (Only one costume set sticks out as atrocious: King Ferdinand's crown and cape of arms look like badly sown together car decays. Forgiven when, having died, he's laid out on a black and gold tapestry, which should be sold by JCPenny. And not the only decoration from a Bronston epic that should be duplicated: Armstrong or Mannington should consider selling replications of the best floor in all of movies -- the inlaid masterpiece for Herod's palace in KING OF KINGS.) The use of Spain's real castles and landscapes add immeasurable legitimate weight -- underlining some of the overtly false, flimsy settings of BEN-HUR. For those who have only seen the pre-restored EL CID on TV, or on one of the two very poor quality video versions available, there must be disappointment because not only is the color washed out, and no overtures or exit music, but of course they miss entirely the sweep, the grandeur -- and a lot of tidbits: like watching the troops build their multi-story ramps, or catching the facial reactions of the various ladies-in-waiting, or getting to giggle at Thring's earrings or at Ben Yussuf's armies capped in turbans that in succession look like mushrooms, candied jujubes, peanut shells and the Elephant Man's head, or getting a good look at Vallone's blooded-up chest, with its skin peeled back. State of the Art might not have been a term yet coined, but Vallone's wounds, and Heston's facial scar and the arrow that's embedded into his chest are excellent 1961 makeup effects.
No American actor was born to play historic figures more than Charlton Heston. His only rivals are Englishmen -- Rex Harrison, Peter O'Toole, and Laurence Olivier, who, never looking more magisterial, steals SPARTACUS away from Kirk Douglas. The epic as genre would have continued on its loony, chaotic way without Heston, but as its center, he gave it legitimacy; somehow his mid-Western intonational Voice of All Ages and his handsome physical stature imposingly fused. He had the odd, unearned gift of penetrating our modern cynicism and could redeem the stilted formal lingo of spectaculars. And little quarrel that his shadow eclipsed those in Hollywood epics who came before him, like Gregory Peck, or the unnerving Robert Taylor, who always seemed to be waiting to break for a cigarette. Part of this has to do with Heston's ability to look appropriately weathered and flawed, as in EL CID. Yet he's not oversized, either, like the stockyard beefiness of misfit Victor Mature; there's something reassuring about how Heston's masculinity remains strongly intact despite the furs, flowing capes and silks he's often been required to wear. Because we'll never know what the men of history he's played will sould like, Heston's legacy could be that we would expect them to come close to matching him. (Especially true when he's done up as Andrew Jackson.) That doesn't mean Heston's performances have always been successful: I didn't believe but a minute or two of his Moses, no matter what vulgarian DeMille declared about the hunt for elusive facts. But Heston's inadvertently funny; how could he not be opposite Anne Baxter's camp-tramp Nefertiri? While not playing a known figure as Judah, his Oscar-winning performance was based on novelist Lew Wallace's suggestion of what Jewish royalty might have been like during the time of Roman rule over Judea. In retrospect, BEN-HUR is a spectacle of stereotype and hate: all the Romans look and act like primped-up pansies. Not unintentional: Gore Vidal, who did some of the re-writing of the script, changed the psychology of the friendship between Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd's evil Messala to a revenge on unrequited lust -- without Heston's acknowledge. The question of the House of Hur's Jewish faith also gets cloudy: will Judah, his mother and sister convert as Christers after the climatic cure of leprosy? (They do in the novel.) The best thing about 55 DAYS AT PEKING, in which Heston's under-ultilized as an American marine battling the Boxer Rebellion, is that Peking-Imperial City set. The Roman Forum was being built for ROMAN EMPIRE when Heston signed on to do PEKING, so Bronston had his standing army of carpenters re-construct the forum into the Chinese city. God only knows what kind of pressure Heston exerted on Sir Carol Reed to avoid playing Michelangelo as a homosexual in THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY, and though there were many other things wrong with the epic -- like the mini-documentary which opens it and avoids giving us a full frontal of David -- Heston's reticence to record the great master as he was is its major failing. Was the closely cropped beard the only hint at inclination Heston would permit? Did he not see that the Sistine Chapel is wrought with religio-homoeroticism? He insinuates with one daring pre-Freud, pre-genetic line, "God crippled me." As John the Baptist in THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, Heston not only once again looked the part, he bellowed it out with great gusto. KHARTOUM, about the British general Charles Gordon, played by Heston, who must defend the city against the fanatic Arab Mahdi, performed in a left-over-tan-from-OTHELLO by Laurence Olivier, was epic short on length and viewers. Audiences were by 1966 suspicious of, if not burnt out on roadshows. And this one's got a musical score that would otherwise be litigious: composer Frank Cordel steals from SPARTACUS, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, CLEOPATRA, even from THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY. Heston's not at all bad in his accent, and he's terrifically appealing in receding grayish hair and those formal duds -- particularly his gold-on-black dress uniform. Yet once again his refusal to play out the historical facts -- Gordon was gay, and probably more neurotic and blood thirsty than T.E. Lawrence -- stunts the characterization. (Beginning to see a phony "family values" pattern?) Judging from the reviews of his stage appearances as Sir Thomas More in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, he was persuasive as the myopic numskull stuck on God's mandates. But then Heston made the fatal mistake of directing himself in a TNT-production. What a complete shambles it is. The house of cards playwright Robert Bolt built collapses; there's no distinction between the reasonable assumption of moral laws and Heston's politics. As if comeuppance, he becomes a man of no season.
EL CID is the movie most of Heston's fans and many lovers of epics have enthusiastically embraced. For good reason: he's at his most chivalrous. In this present age of misogyny, watching his Cid refuse to be vanquished by or turn ugly over his love's avenging duty is reassuring; it's meant to be noble, and honorable, and it's both, but it's also something of a resurrection of sexual chemistry: the Cid's and Chimene's loin lust will not be tamed. Under Mann's direction and the marvellous lighting by cinematographer Robert Krasker, much of this hormonal alchemy is transmuted through framed posing; and it is in the barn, minutes before intermission, that they are finally relieved of their prolonged pentupness. It's the the healthiest sequence in the entire movie, with Loren at her most relaxed. Smart observers, and readers of Heston's book, will also note that there's a discernible tension between the two stars during most of the first half. If Heston's account is to be trusted, it came about because "All in all, the most trying time with an actress I can ever recall. Mind you, (Loren) is not a bitch...just more star than pro." In turn, Loren says not a word about Heston in her own book, and she's not the only actress to pointedly ignore him: Ava Gardner chose the silent routine in her bio. But watching Loren opposite Mr. Clean makes you believe her intuition early on picked up the need to create some friction because without it, their characters wouldn't spark. Mr. Clean wouldn't admit it, but Loren's gambit helps him enormously; this is his only performance in any of his epics in which the audience senses that he isn't more in love with his enemies or horses than with his leading ladies.
The Cid's other highly attractive virtue is his selfless righteousness. For example, it's fact that when he recaptured Valenica from the Emirs, he did not accept the crown of the city, as was demanded by his followers, but instead, in order to unite Spain against the invaders, took it in the name of King Alfonso, who had previously banished him into exile because he publicly humiliated the King into swearing that he had no part in the (real) assassination of his brother Sancho. Yet here's where the movie and what's known about the royal family gets factually shaky: when Ferdinand died, he willed that his empire be divided into three parts for his sons, Sancho, Alfonso and Garcia. In the movie, he wills to Sancho, Alfonso and daughter Dona Urraca, and never once is Garcia's name uttered. History records no will to a daughter. The script changed Garcia (who was in fact killed in a power grab by Alfonso) to Urraca for dramatic tension, and it is at her feet that Sancho's death lay. The writers, Philip Yordan and Fredric M. Frank, a pseudonym for blacklisted Ben Barzman, who also worked on THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, spiced her up by suggesting that she had the incestuous hots for Alfonso, and may have had a thing for the Cid as well. (Historians interested in the private lives of these figures report the Cid was the most handsome man of his time, and that by the age of 20 he was already knighted, and that Chimene was a cousin to the royal family.) As Urraca, French actress Genevieve Page, looking like an embittered Elke Sommer, does what she can to insinuate the sinister (her clipped English helps), but, though this movie has been "fully restored," there's either reluctance on Mann and the writers's parts to dive deeper into her or that scenes were cut. This happens to Frank Thring too: though his brief moments are comic relief -- he's like the Australian version of Jay Robinson -- surely there should be more to him than what we get. (Still short of tongue, looking grotesquely rotund with his bald head and chin down to there, Thring played The Collector in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME.) The legend of the Cid as incorruptible probably isn't quite true, either: he was a soldier of fortune-opportunist who fought on the sides of both Christians and Moslems, and was richly rewarded. Only when the North African Emirs threatened to overtake Spain did he see his heroic duty of uniting Spain. Though the movie emblemizes the oft-repeated legend of Rodrigo -- that he fell as a result of a battle-inflicted wound and rode off into history strapped, dead but open-eyed, on a white horse -- historians record that he actually died four years after defeating the Emirs in Valenica. His death at 49 is said by biographers to have been brought on by grief and shame over the huge numbers of casualties it took to do so. The Cid is buried at the cathedral in Burgos.
If Elizabeth Taylor is contemporary, out of her vocal element as the Queen of the Nile or Shakespeare's Katharina, Sophia Loren seems much at home in antiquity; her stressed, emphatic English befits the colloquial language of epics. Like Heston, it's her size and voice -- they emit a transitory authority. It's only when we think about some of what she says do we have misgivings: "Moors? You let Moors live?" (Every once in a while she sounds like Gina Lollobrigida in Vidor's SOLOMON AND SHEBA.) She looks gorgeous in costume: perhaps her best is the emerald green cote-hardie over a white bliaut with embroidered amoeba-like leaves, topped with a starched lifted collar, that she wears at the wedding banquet. (The richest-looking wardrobe, however, belongs to Douglas Wilmer as brown liquid-eyed Lord Moutamin.) And only on the big screen can we appreciate her swaying hips as she, dressed in mournful black, struts through the King's Court. Heston, once more, bitched that Loren refused to allow herself to age, noting that the movie's time span covers more than twenty years. Covering the criticize, Raf Vallone says to her, "Even all these months in the dungeon have not marred your beauty." But she was smart to resist the makeup effects: she's not there for anything other than her desirable ornamentation. Borrowing from Helen of Troy, Loren's is a face that launches a thousand men against the King-captor.
"Script, acting, images and music all act in perfect harmony," writes British author Derek Elley in THE EPIC FILM. Not exactly; the script's cliches aren't fully saved by the cast's efforts because too often the cliches are central to the movie's problems of conventionality. There's one glaringly hokey sequence that somehow Heston, who fought with Mann regularly, didn't consider worthy of fighting against: when the Cid, in exile, comes across a leper named Lazarus. A genuflection to BEN-HUR, it's appalling, and made even more so when up pops Chimene, who decides she must support her stripped-of-wealth, sexually deprived husband. You have to ask: how did she get to the locale as quickly as the Cid without him knowing it? And sometimes the acting isn't as large-scale as it is anxious, over-wrought. But the right god and goddess are in awfully fine harmony with the imagery, music and sound effects. Miklos Rozsa's orgasmic score, notes Elley, was originally written to cover almost 100% of the film, but Mann discovered in Verna Fields (who would do the film editing for BONNIE AND CLYDE and JAWS) a gifted sound technician: her matchless ear for a slap with a glove, for dueling swords, galloping horses, convinced Mann to eliminate over an hour of music. What survives is more than enough. Rozsa, who won an Oscar for BEN-HUR and died in 1995, went to Madrid to research with Nobel Prize-winning historian Dr. Ramon Menendez Pidal, who introduced the composer to the 12th Century cantigas of Santa Maria and the 13th Century cantigas of Alfonso X, which were inspired by Phrygian culture. The score's most likely at its loving zenith, and its simplest, when the Cid returns to the convent to meet, for the first time, his twin daughters, and when Chimene puts her hand to his scar. Excluding script convention, the movie's most troublesome element is in the actual sound recordings: in Heston's diary, he reported that as much as seventy percent of the soundtrack would have to be redone, "something to do with inconsistent Spanish current." What's amazing is that, in spite of the echo of hollowness -- the lack of integrity that results from looping -- the results aren't harmful, as they definitely are in BARABBAS, probably because of the decision to noisy up the soundtrack with stereophonic blasts of Rozsa's frenzied score and the sound effects. Film editor Robert Lawrence has one remarkable feat: during the joust for Calahorra, he not only has to avoid showing the double used when a sword is swinging away at the Cid's saddle, he also has to splice in Loren's reaction shots, which were filmed weeks before. (You can tell: the lighting & wind effects in the King's grand stand don't quite match the actual outdoor shots.) But the binding used to wrap it all up is Robert Krasker's painstaking photography, much of which could pass for paintings. The restoration returns glorious moments like the first scene of the Cid and Chimene together in the rotunda -- wherein the stars perform the greatest non-kiss in movie history; the Cid, underneath the spiral staircase, bracing himself against the very sword he used to kill Chimene's father; Chimene sitting in her bed chamber on her wedding night; Ferdinand's lying-in-state; the opening shot in the barn; the night scenes of Ben Yussuf's's men riding their horses towards Valenica (the movie makers used Peniscola) and his infantry banging its drums. There's not a single shot in BEN-HUR that equals them. In retrospect, given that BEN-HUR remains the most Oscar-awarded epic so far, the sentiment may come to be that EL CID is the most egregiously neglected epic by the Academy. But thanks, Marty, for returning to us foofs the gold we've long waited for.
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