Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Absolutely Fantastic

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The teardrop of Sofia Loren is the hallmark of the movie. No man uses Agua Brava aftershave anymore but boy it was OK then. In our post post era we could take this away from the movie that good storytelling will never be outdated. A role model pur sang for people that have need for deepness in their lives.

I give it a three because the footage of Spain and the costumes are nice. El Cid is famous for his beard. No beard on Charleton Heston. He got power from that hair. Second, maybe they were trying to teach us a point at the time of the cold war to just get along in the opening scene where El Cid shows compassion and tells the Moors that he will let them go if they don't return to fight. From there its bad. The acting is stiff the story line is nothing of the real Cid's life. He had a famous horse and fought on the side of three different lords one was a Moor. He was undefeated that's about all they get right. Its bad acting and will leave you no historical knowledge you could use. The fight scenes which are so common are terrible too. Charleton Heston was right about the director sucking in this epic with his fight scenes. Pretty bad and not worth three hours of your life.

I loved it now as well as I loved it first time, when I saw it in the early sixties. Maybe more. It is an epic, perhaps not very accurate historically, still appealing. You see interesting director's solutions, attention to details. Heston and Loren are gorgeous and inspiring. Mass scenes would be quite cost prohibitive nowadays and be substituted by animations. Yes, it is long. But somehow I do not get tired. The dialogs, the music, the costumes, the scenery, the makeup - they used to take their time to do all of these things back in the day. I think El Cid can hold its own against any contemporary epic, without an exception.

There's a reason why they can't make good epic movies anymore. It isn't due to lack of money. "The Lord of the Rings" proved that. And it isn't because they're afraid of harming stuntmen or animals. Nowadays, they can manage all that sort of thing perfectly well with CGI effects. No, the reason nobody seems able to produce good epic motion pictures anymore is because of the main characters. When you make a movie on a really grand scale, complete with lavish costumes and sets, a cast of thousands, and filmed in super wide-screen format, then the first thing you need is central characters who are at least ten times larger than life. Which brings us to a perfect case in point, El Cid. If there was one thing Charleton Heston could do better than any other actor in the business, it was stand out against a background of lavish sets and a cast of thousands. It was no accident that Heston was cast as Moses in the Ten Commandments, as well as in the title role in Ben Hur. The producers of those films knew exactly what qualities they need for their leading man, and so did the producers of El Cid.And then, of course, there's Heston's leading lady, Sophia Loren. Put Sophia Loren in a scene set in the middle of a huge, lavishly-decorated medieval throne room, filled with hundreds of colorfully-garbed extras, and I guarantee that you won't be able to look at anything but her. Nope, it can't be done, it's simply a physical impossibility. And she doesn't even have to do or say anything, just BE THERE. Don't believe it? Check out El Cid and see for yourself!I don't know if they have a name for that special quality that Charleton Heston and Sophia Loren had. Whatever it is, it certainly isn't something that can be learned at the Actor's Studio. You're either born with it, or you're never going to have it. Of course, to balance out the ten-times-large-than-live leads, an epic motion picture also requires a ten-times-larger-than-life villein. In the case of El Cid, that role is ably filled by Herbert Lom. The fact that you never actually see the actor's face amply demonstrated exactly how much larger-than-life an actor he really was. You didn't need to see his face, that voice was more than sufficient. No other actor had a voice like Herbert Lom.I believe El Cid received rather mixed reviews at time it was released. However, over time, it seems to have gained a much greater appreciation.