Finally . . . this extraordinary film is available on DVD, in a wonderful edition with lots of extras from The Miriam Collection, a new home video division of Miramax.
El Cid might be be the best of all the widescreen epics. It's visual style is bold, elegant and often stunning, with none of the process photography that dates so many big films from this era. The narrative has tremendous momentum and the melodrama is stark and wrenching, very adult for an epic, inflected with a mature kind of eroticism.
Its tale of conflict between Christian and Moor in medieval Spain has troubling resonances today, though the film makes an effort to distinguish between humane and fanatical Muslims and to posit the idea of an alliance between Christians and Muslims of goodwill.
The action sequences, stage by second unit director Yakima Canutt, who essentially directed the chariot race episode in Ben Hur, are gripping and the choreography of the armies on the move and in battle is both elegant and stirring. No amount of computer genius could ever dispose CGI soldiers and armies in virtual space this beautifully and convincingly.
As a kid on the edge of puberty I had my first recognizably sexual feelings while watching Sophia Loren in El Cid -- she's a breathtaking incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with a power beyond rational challenge. Heston does what he does best -- hold his own plausibly against backdrops (and, in the case of Loren, bosoms) of epic size.
The film has a dark, macabre undertone but is still wildly entertaining, and a great work of art and craft in the bargain.