At Home With El Cid

Director Anthony Mann gets the possessor credit when fans and critics speak of "El Cid," but the film assigns that billing to its producer, the imperturbable hustler Samuel Bronston, who practically reinvented movie spectacles on the plains of Spain in the early 1960s. Shunning the waning studio culture of Hollywood, Bronston created his own studio in Madrid in 1958 and financed it with an intricate money laundering operation involving the Franco government and a vindictive member of the DuPont family who didn't think losses should be part of the risk. His meteoric empire soared with "El Cid" and plummeted with "Fall of the Roman Empire," also directed by Mann, three years later. As lawyers and prosecutors investigated the company's transgressions, Bronston's epics were more often shelved than shown.

Now the Weinstein Company is scheduling DVD restorations of the films (part of its Miriam Collection), beginning this coming week with "El Cid," encouraging a re-assessment of Bronston and his work. Vindication seems likely. Bronston, who died in 1994 at 85, beaten by creditors and Alzheimer's, is difficult for film lovers to hate. As he put it, he was "insane" for movies, and by most accounts uninterested in personal wealth; he poured the money he raised into his pictures, which are often dazzling.

That's one reason people bond over "El Cid," especially if they saw it as intended, filling the massive screen of the old, resplendent, and lamented Warner Theater on 47th Street and Broadway, where it opened in December 1961. With its glorious vistas, clanking battles, luminous colors, thumping Miklos Rozsa music, and unforgettable climax, all unfolding in 70mm grandeur like a living tapestry, it was cinema as circus — an enveloping, emotional, even inspirational event. The DVD, good as it is (clean transfer, bright and stable colors, impenetrable blacks, vivid audio), can only imply that experience, like the reproduction of a Vermeer.

If RKO once gave Orson Welles "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had," Bronston gave Mann the entirety of Spain — with its castles and churches, an army, whole communities of costume-sewers, and an elastic check to cover such extras as swords made in the same foundry that served the real Cid. Mann returned the favor. In some respects, "El Cid" is the pinnacle of his career, a visionary extrapolation of characteristic themes involving heroism, violence, treachery, fragile alliances, and moral ambiguity, previously explored in genre films he made over two decades.

Yet "El Cid" is different: It's a driven, humorless picture in which moral absolution is embodied in the Cid's increasing conviction that he is chosen, that if right makes might (as he prays it will before a brutal, brilliantly filmed tournament), so must might make right. He is blinding and blinded by his own conviction. Gone are the charming rogues, comical asides, and ambivalent gallants of Mann's noirs and Westerns. Not entirely gone is the heroic kink, the touch of madness that defines Mann's guardians of order.

The story, based partly on Corneille's play, tells of how Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (Charlton Heston), called the Cid (lord) by a Moor ally, defended the Christian kingdom against a Berber invasion led by a murderous fanatic, the fictional Ben Yussef — wonderfully played by Herbert Lom, in a caricature based on Yusuf ibn Tashfin, who in real life died after the Cid, having enjoyed many more victories on the battlefield. For all the money spent on period detail, "El Cid" is not intended as a history lesson. The film's progressiveness, which comes to the fore as Rodrigo unites Christians and Moors, is undermined by the presentation of Moors and Berbers in brownface, complete with heavy eyeliner. Imperialist conventions die hard: In 1961, good guys were tall, white, and American; bad guys were short, dark, and wore black robes — making the climactic battles easy to judge.

"El Cid" is raised beyond that convention by its rare insistence on giving equal time to Rodrigo's domestic life — at least his troubled love affair with Chimene (Sophia Loren), whose father he killed to defend his own father's honor — and his ascension from human warrior to national demiurge. The love angle is heightened and undermined by the casting of Mr. Heston and Ms. Loren. Their individual close-ups are sensational, their two-shots less so.

Mr. Heston is one of few leading men who never displayed chemistry with a woman, excepting — bada-bing — Kim Hunter in "Planet of the Apes." Given a chance to turn the corner with Ms. Loren, he could not overcome, according to the accompanying documentaries, his resentment of her higher salary and vanity, though she is no more fastidiously coiffed and made-up than he. In their initial union, staged by Mann to command the fullness of widescreen, they walk to the softly lit center, hands outstretched, and nibble at each other like goldfish. The actors really come alive when simmering in mutual odium.

At one point, the traitorous Count Ordóñez (Raf Vallone) visits the imprisoned Chimene and says, "Even all these months in the dungeon have not marred your beauty." Clearly, jailors have been smuggling in lipstick, rouge, mascara, and various concealers, and who would want it any other way? These are larger than life figures, so casually mythological that when a little girl approaches them, she's as up to par on their private lives as if they had popped out of a tabloid.

But Mann tacks deeper than the mythology, which accepts that the Cid is the purest of all knights. Though his journey into greatness begins with his decision to spare the lives of a few Moors, circumstances turn him into a soldier of fortune, a paladin. An hour or so into the three-hour story, the narrative takes a remarkable turn: Rodrigo has been appointed the king's champion and rejected by Chimene. He disappears from the film for six minutes, during which the king dies and the princes, one purported to be incestuously involved with his sister, try to kill each other. The rightful king, to whom Rodrigo has sworn allegiance, sends his brother Alfonso to prison.

Suddenly, the Cid appears, alone, willing to kill 13 of the king's guards to liberate the devious Alfonso. This is clearly an act of treason, but Rodrigo's probity is, one might say, unmoored from realpolitik. He radiates crazed individualism — not unlike the Lee J. Cobb character in Mann's "Man of the West" (1958). As a result of his action, the king will be assassinated, Rodrigo banished, and Chimene imprisoned. The complexity of Mann's portrait is underscored at the battle of Valencia, when Rodrigo intemperately decides to abandon the battle. Similarly, Rodrigo's deathbed determination to lead the final charge and his reconciliation with Alfonso are expressions of arrant pride. The fact that his indispensability is Q.E.D. does not diminish the narcissism that launches him into the realm of legend.

Within its generic requirements, "El Cid" is not unflawed, but the flaws are insignificant. To justify international financing, Bronston had to hire international players, resulting in Spaniards who speak with American, British, French, and Italian — never Spanish — accents. Several performances are memorable: Andrew Cruickshank as Chimene's burly father, Douglas Wilmer as the good Moor, Genevieve Page as Urraca (whose supreme moment is her dentalized reading of the line, "After all, we would lose a city"), and John Fraser as Alfonso, who shares with Mr. Heston one of the film's finest minutes, when Rodrigo forces Alfonso to swear his innocence. Mann shot the scene with four camera setups and inserted a half-second glimpse of a Bible as a rhythmic punctuation in the editing.

Cinematographer Robert Krasker, who established black-and-white standards in Carol Reed's "The Third Man," is no less rigorous here in color. The script, mostly by Ben Barzman, with contributions by Ben Maddow and possibly others (though not Philip Yordan, who claimed it), is famous for averting spectacle-speak. Unfortunately, neither man was credited because of the 1950s blacklist. Rozsa's score similarly succeeds by averting cliché, favoring brasses and percussion for Rodrigo, strings for Chimene, and the full orchestra for personal and military rapprochement. No film had more fanfares, and not even Count Basie's "New Testament" band could have played them with greater precision. Bronston always got his money's worth.

Mr. Giddins is the author of "Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books."