Trailer
Plot summary
Ben Yusuf, general of the Almoravids, gathers the emirs of Moorish Spain in North Africa and orders them to resume war on their Christian neighbors. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, riding to his wedding with Chimene, drives a Moorish army from a Spanish town and takes two emirs prisoner. He frees them after they promise to leave Castile in peace, and they hail him as El Cid. At court Count Ordóñez charges him with treason for that mercy, and Chimene's father, Count Gormaz, the king's champion, supports the charge. When Gormaz strikes Rodrigo's aged father, Don Diego, Rodrigo takes up the duel in his father's place, and Chimene swears to avenge her father.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about El Cid (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Two days before filming started, Sophia Loren read the latest draft, was displeased with her dialogue and recommended hiring blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman to revise it. Mann got Barzman onto a plane to Rome and handed him the draft, which Barzman found unusable.
- Barzman based a new screenplay on the seventeenth-century play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, borrowed from the French embassy library in Madrid. In 1967 Mann told Bertrand Tavernier that not one line of the shooting script was written by Yordan, yet Barzman's credit was not added until 1999.
- Loren was available for only ten to twelve weeks, for which she was paid $1 million, making her the second actress after Elizabeth Taylor to earn that much for a film. Bronston also agreed to pay $200 a week for her hairdresser.
- Orson Welles was initially approached to play Ben Yusuf, but he insisted that a double do his on-set performance while he dubbed in his lines during post-production. Bronston refused.
- The production leased 1,700 trained infantrymen from the Spanish Army and 500 mounted riders from Madrid's Municipal Honor Guard, built 15 war machines and siege towers from historical artwork, and decorated 35 boats with battlements to serve as the Moorish fleet.
- The duel took five days to shoot, totalling 31 hours of combat before editing, and 21,000 meters of film was shot for the sequence, of which only 330 meters remained in the finished picture.
- Because El Cid was an Italian co-production the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene was hired first, but he refused Bronston's demand to adapt Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid, so Bronston turned to Rózsa, who agreed Nascimbene could be credited on Italian prints only and claim no royalties.
- To strengthen cordial ties to the Spanish government ruled by Francisco Franco, Bronston began developing a biographical film of El Cid; during his reign Franco had admired and compared himself to El Cid.
