Pharonic Fantasy Theatre: Hollywood Historical Hooey

Wow, I hope that this isn’t inauspicious. For my first mainstream Hollywood film to review for this blog I had to go and choose El Cid, which ended up being a disappointment, to say the least. This limp 1960s historical epic isn’t hideous by any means, it just did not live up to my expectations. Well anyway, here’s my first Hollywood review, and since I felt neither strong love nor burning hate for this movie it’s not gonna be a long one.

Theatrical Film, 1961

Director: Anthony Mann

The Story

Hollywood Historical Revisionism strikes again! It’s the Eleventh Century. Spain is torn in a war between the Christian Spaniards and the Moslem Moors. After being charged with treason for sparing the lives of some Moorish Emirs, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston) kills his fiancée’s father in a duel over his father’s honor. Awk-ward! For some reason she now suddenly wants to kill him. Huh. For some reason he still loves her, even after she admits to hiring a rival suitor to ambush and kill him. Pft. The games those lovers play, eh? Anyway, after “proving” his innocence – ahh, I love medieval “justice” – in a jousting match (TO THE DEATH! Cue Star Trek music!) Don Rodrigo, or “El Cid” as he is now known marries the fiancée that still hates him – double AWK-WARD! – and becomes embroiled in petty sibling bickering after the King of Castile dies and wills his kingdom to his three children (when will monarchs learn that dividing their kingdom amongst their children will never work, especially when there’s three of them? You’d think they’d remember King Lear). To make a long (very long) story short, El Cid is exiled after a royal hissy fit, is reunited with his wife who suddenly decides that she loves him after all (haha, those silly women and their mood swings!) and fights to keep Spain from being invaded by a tyrannical North African despot. There are lots of battles, lots of blood, lots of tears and I really didn’t care that much because it was all very, very dull.

The Review

For once I think I agree on something with Charlton Heston – this movie is pretty lousy. Heston reportedly once said that El Cid would have been a better movie if William Wyler (the man who directed Heston in Ben-Hur) had made it instead of Anthony Mann. And you know, I think he’s right. This film is just mediocre. The acting is mediocre, the music is mediocre, the cinematography is mediocre, and the direction is just, well, mediocre. And this is a shame because the talent that went into this film should have made it much better than it was.
Charlton Heston, while not being the greatest actor ever, was a pretty good one (when he wanted to be). Here he is wooden and has zero chemistry with the female lead, Sophia Loren, who is even more wooden and looks like one of the living dead throughout the whole movie (on a side note, I know I’m about to commit Hollywood Blasphemy here, but I’ve never considered Loren to be that good looking. She’s always been trumpeted as one of the greatest beauties to grace the silver screen. I think she’s always looked rather… creepy). In fact, you know what I think Heston’s problem was? I think he honestly wasn’t good at the romantic stuff. I think he acted better opposite other men (an exception is The Three Musketeers but there the woman he interacts with is his employee and not his love interest). It’s not just this movie, either. In Ben-Hur the chemistry between him and Stephen Boyd is electric whether they are proclaiming their friendship or trying to kill each other, while the scenes between him and his love interest fall flat. In El Cid the most sparks come in the title character’s relations with one of the Emirs he saves earlier in the film. At a few points I honestly thought that Heston and Douglas Wilmer were going to start making out right there on film. Ah, the friendship between MEN! The other actors (it’s a cast of thousands!) are good character and bit actors but just go through the motions here.
Miklós Rózsa wrote one of the greatest film scores ever for Ben-Hur, and wrote many fantastic scores for many other great movies besides. Here he’s basically ripping off his Ben-Hur soundtrack but making it less memorable and more limp. In fact, I would call the film score for this movie Ben-Hur Lite. You know what I think happened? I think Rózsa blew his wad with the score for that 1959 classic and it took about a decade for him to get his creative juices flowing again, because just about every score of his from this period is Ben-Hur Lite (King of Kings along with this movie are the worst offenders).
The landscapes of Spain are gorgeous but aren’t really captured that well on camera most of the time. You can photograph the most beautiful thing in the world, but the picture won’t be good if the photographer sucks.
And last but not least, the direction for this clunker is some of the most flaccid I’ve ever seen. I don’t know that much about the director, Anthony Mann but I see by looking at his filmography that at the time he made this he was a respected director of Westerns. The man was supposed to have some talent, so whether he just couldn’t handle this type of movie, or was having a bad day (month? Year?), or just ended up being a middling director after all, it was disappointing to see such a movie with great potential but lifeless execution. El Cid is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

Actually, you know what? I spent more time writing on this than I said I would. Damn!

Well, if you actually read the monster paragraphs above then you basically know what my recommendation would be on this movie, but for the lazy amongst you – or those that want it beaten into your skulls – here is my advice: don’t waste your time on this movie. It’s not a good movie, but it’s also not bad enough to have fun with. It’s just a middling effort from Hollywood in an era that had exhausted the Historical Epic format (thank God David Lean would revive it just a few short years later with Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago).

Screenshots

Even though this film is three hours long I’m not going to take up much space with pictures from it.