El Cid Analysis

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, born c. 1043, earned enduring fame and the title Mio Cid, from Arabic sayyid, meaning “My Lord.” Your task will be to craft an essay with a minimum of 1600 words. Your essay must satisfactorily answer each of the following questions:

Who was the historical Cid?
How is the Cid portrayed in literature?
How is the Cid portrayed in cinema?
What are the key differences in your answers to the first three questions above? What explains these differences?
Why is El Cid historically significant?
Why is El Cid culturally significant?
What is the difference between historical and cultural significance?
Your answers must include supporting evidence from:

El Cid (1960) – the movie (1 copy on reserve in Greenwood Library) Note: It is a TWO-disc movie!
The Poem of the Cid
“The Purest Knight of All”Preview the document – the article by Jancovich
At least TWO additional scholarly sources
Your essay must also:

Be double spaced
Have numbered pages
Have a title page
Include a bibliography
Cite evidence using either MLA or Chicago

University of Texas Press
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
“The Purest Knight of All”: Nation, History, and Representation in “El Cid” (1960)
Author(s): Mark Jancovich
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 79-103
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
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“The Purest Knight of All”: Nation, History, and
Representation in El Cid (1960)
by Mark Jancovich
This article examines the Samuel Bronston production of El Cid (1960) and analyzes the process of cultural hybridization through which various myths of the
Spanish national hero are stitched together and, in the process, reinterpreted to
produce an epic movie for an international market.
Within academic film criticism, the historical epic has become the focus of a small
but growing body of literature. Much of this work focuses on the function of the
epic as cinematic spectacle. These films were frequently sold with the promise
that these spectacles not only represented history but themselves were historically
momentous achievements. It was claimed that they provided sights never seen
before or, at least, never since ancient times.
Further, a number of critics have claimed that these films were part of the
Hollywood system’s self-promotion. Like musicals, they were spectacles that only
Hollywood could achieve and therefore established the American film industry’s
prestige and power as a unique cultural institution. In other words, these films did
not simply commodify the past and reproduce a consumerist discourse around
materialist spectacle; they also were vehicles for cinematic exhibitionism that enabled Hollywood to promote itself by reproducing or recreating the scale of bygone civilizations.’
This preoccupation with spectacle has made for some very dull films. The
repeated complaint is that they are overly long or that the focus on spectacle almost freezes the action. The camera lingers too long on the details of the past that
the studios have so lovingly or lavishly recreated, or the films present endlessly
long shots of crowds and pageants. Often forgotten is that other critics have complained about the focus in Hollywood cinema on narrative and have seen the focus
on spectacle as a potentially subversive force that threatens to disrupt its ideological logic.2 Nonetheless, some critics have addressed the relationship between spectacle and narrative in these films. Stephen Neale, for example, compares the
historical epic to the musical and its organization around numbers and routines.3
This is not to suggest that these films lack a narrative, simply that the focus on
“narrative drive” in much scholarship on film narrative may underestimate the
Mark Jancovich is a senior lecturer and director of the Institute of Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of several books: Horror (1992), The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (1993), Approaches to Popular Film (edited with Joanne Hollows,
1995), and Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996). He is currently the director
of a research project on film consumption in Nottingham, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
? 2000 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 79
extent to which all film stories are built around the interrelationship between a
series of elements, from individual shots, through specific sequences, to scenes
and even longer passages.4 Many epics, for example, have long sections made up
of a series of scenes that operate as distinct subsections of the overall narrative.
These films may at times lack the strong narrative drive that distinguishes other
Hollywood products, but this may simply be because their narratives seem rather
to unfold, often because they rely on the retelling of already-familiar story lines.
There is no enigma to solve in the Christ story, for instance, only a process to be
confirmed. Even in tales such as Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) or Orphans of
the Storm (D. W Griffith, 1922), the narrative is told against a historical backdrop
with which the spectator is presumed to be familiar. The emphasis in many of
these films, therefore, is not on the drive toward resolution, which the spectator
can probably guess, but on the process of narrative exposition.
The preoccupation in historical epics with spectacle has also been related to
issues of sexuality and violence, particularly as they relate to the representation of
masculinity and the masculine body. Neale, for example, suggests that epics operate as displays of power and submission that negotiate the function of the spectacular male. The male body is supposed to be a problem in these films because it
operates as an object of both adoration and repulsion.
The historical epic has received a great deal of academic interest recently
precisely because of its handling of the male body as an object of the gaze.5 The
debate basically relates to the assumption that in a patriarchal culture the appropriate object of the gaze is defined as feminine and, as a result, the image of the
male body always raises the problem of homoerotic desires that must be disavowed
and repressed. Several strategies, it is claimed, can be used to accomplish this
process. First, the gaze can be deflected onto a female body so that the male body
becomes a point of identification rather than objectification. The male body is
therefore defined as merely one stage in a relay of gazes, the ultimate object of
which is defined as female. Second, the male body can defuse anxieties through
self-irony. This technique has been noted in research on the James Bond films6
and in relation to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star image,7 but in both cases, it is
argued, humor is used to undercut the idealizations of the male body on which
these films are based. Third, and perhaps most significantly, historical epics have
relied on sadism, in which desire for the male body is disavowed by making its
display conditional on its punishment. In this way, acts of sexual display are both
permitted and disassociated from homoeroticism in that the male body is constructed as an object of hatred rather than desire. Alternatively, objectification is
narratively defined as an unnatural state from which the heroic male body must
extricate itself.8 In short, the male hero must be positioned as a point of identification not objectification.
Indeed, these depictions of the male body have often been tied to a fascistic
obsession with the idealized, classical body. Indeed, the male classical body is often
presented as a disciplined body whose materiality and excesses have been contained
by form.9 It is a body in which the head dominates, controls its bodily functions, and
so permits the construction of a clear distinction between internal and external.
80 Cinema Journal 40o, No. 1, Fall 2000
Furthermore, this body is not only implicitly male but the feminine is everything
that must be disavowed and excluded. In contrast to the classical male body, the
female body is corporeal and carnal and refuses to respect distinctions between
internal and external. The classical male body is a body that fears femininity in particular and otherness in general and is founded on repressed homoeroticism.10
This association between the historical epic and fascistic spectacle is found in
Angela Dalle Vacche’s work. To some extent, this association is an inevitable result
of her specific object of analysis, the Italian historical epics made under Mussolini;
however, her discussion of the features of historical epics is similar to other accounts of these films. They are described as “kitsch,” that is, defined as “fascism’s
pseudo-democratic answer, an anti-democratic ideology using a popular form of
address while simulating the authority of high art.””11 This description is similar to
Clement Greenberg’s description of kitsch,’2 or what Dwight Macdonald would
call midcult, that “peculiar hybrid bred from [high culture’s] unnatural intercourse
with [mass culture].”13 Indeed, while some critics have associated these films with
conservative Cold War presentations of Communism as Otherness,’4 for many Cold
War intellectuals, these films were themselves totalitarian in nature and hence
hardly different from the totalitarianism of Communism. So virulent is Macdonald’s
attack on these films that he devotes a whole section of On Movies to “The Biblical
Spectacular,” a subgenre of historical epic.’5
Despite the political rhetoric, many critics object to these films largely based
on taste. For both Dalle Vacche and Macdonald, it is their status as middlebrow
culture that ultimately damns them. Indeed, in his study of French culture, Pierre
Bourdieu found that these blockbusters appealed to middlebrow tastes. He makes
special mention of the collaboration between Samuel Bronston and Charlton
Heston that followed the success of El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1960), namely, 55
Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963).16
As Macdonald emphasizes, the cultural bourgeoisie displayed its greatest hostility to the middlebrow, exactly because the latter leads to a “blurring of the line”
between high and low and therefore threatens to “absorb” them into itself.’7 In
other words, middlebrow culture poses a threat to the authority of intellectuals,
albeit entirely unintentionally. Rather than attempting to deconstruct this distinction, the petite bourgeoisie, whose tastes are represented by the middlebrow, pose
a threat precisely because of their reverence for legitimate culture, a reverence
based on their feelings of exclusion from that culture. If the petite bourgeoisie
threaten to blur distinctions between high and low and so undermine the authority
of the cultural bourgeoisie, it is due to their desire to obtain legitimate culture. As
Bourdieu puts it, “This petite bourgeoisie of consumers [is one] which means to
acquire on credit, i.e., before its due time, the attributes of the legitimate life-style.”18
The sense of horror with which many critics discuss the historical epic is
often a result of these films’ “pretensions,” their “misguided” notions of quality,
and their reverence for a legitimate culture that they try to emulate. Indeed, in
Macdonald’s discussion of Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), it is not the film’s lowculture status that is at issue. Quite the reverse. He recounts with dismay the
“bellows of approval” with which the film was greeted by reviewers and presents
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 81
his own analysis as a corrective.19 Indeed, these films were prestige pictures and
frequently received the industry’s highest awards.20
The purpose of this article, however, is not to provide a full and detailed survey of the historical epic but rather to analyze one film, El Cid. Like many epics,
El Cid was a product of a particular stage in the development of the blockbuster.
Not only was it made for an international market but it was filmed in Spain and
drew on transnational resources and talent. These conditions shaped the film in a
number of ways. The first section of this article therefore examines the production
context of the film so as to establish the particular play of national and transnational
concerns in its production. It should be emphasized, however, that this is not intended to be an analysis of the film’s production history. It is intended, simply, to
provide a context for the information that follows.
The second section explores problems in defining national cinemas. This section takes issue with those who present El Cid as simply an American bastardization
of an “authentic” Spanish national myth; however, it does not do so to claim that the
film is really an authentic product of Spanish culture. On the contrary, it is these
very definitions of “authenticity” that this article seeks to question. The point is that
an authentic national essence can never be either expressed or corrupted by film
texts, but rather, because of the relation between film and national identity, movies
(and the discourses that surround them) are involved in the production of different
senses of that identity. In other words, the question should not be whether El Cid is
really a Spanish film or not but what is at stake in such definitions and distinctions.
As a result, the third section examines the ways in which the text of a historical
epic is a hybridization of different materials from different national and historical
contexts. However, if earlier accounts of the historical epic privileged the issue of
spectacle at the expense of narrative, this and the following sections focus primarily on the narrative organization of the film. While the film concerns a narrative of
unification, in which disparate fragments come together to produce an integrated
subject-Spain, the focus here is the unification of the narrative-the process by
which fragments of the Cid myth, from different national sources and historical
periods, are brought together and reinterpreted in the process.
Because this process is largely expressed from an American perspective, the
primary interest is how a Spanish national myth was reinterpreted within the
terms of American Cold War discourses. What I have not been able to do is
examine how the film was understood within the Spanish context. An examination of the reviews, for example, would have provided a fascinating and valuable
counterperspective, even though, because of the political situation in Spain at
the time, these reviews would have been even more suspect than usual.”21 Unfortunately, as someone who lacks competence in Spanish, I am unequipped to undertake that project.
The fourth section returns to the concerns discussed earlier in an attempt to
provide a more historicized view of both the representation of masculinity in El
Cid and particularly the way in which its sadomasochistic dynamics were related
to specific American uses of the Oedipal narrative during the Cold War period.22
In short, this section looks at the ways in which the Cid story is reinscribed as a
82 Cinema Journal 40o, No. 1, Fall 2000
conflict between feudal despotism and bourgeois rights, a conflict that is itself
reinscribed as one between liberalism and totalitarianism. Despite its reading of
El Cid as a Cold War text, this essay does not suggest that it is simply a conservative text. On the contrary, it attempts to illustrate the ways in which the film emphasizes the problems, costs, and contradictions of bourgeois masculinity, as well
as the racial politics of various Cid narratives that not only challenged Francoist
versions of the Cid but also clearly articulated its support for the civil rights movement in the United States.
The fifth and final section therefore examines the problem of naming and representation in the film. If the Cid becomes a figure of exemplary masculinity, it is
not through his construction as an “ego-ideal,” an image of presence, unity, and
omnipotence.23 Rather, his function as an exemplary figure is presented as leading
to self-division and internal conflict. He is fraught with contradiction and self-doubt,
and it is in this sense that he is presented as heroic. Without his internal struggle, his
moral integrity becomes indistinguishable from that of the conformist who unthinkingly obeys a rigid ideological code,24 the Other of American Cold War discourse. In
other words, his struggle with his internally divided nature is what distinguishes him
from the subject of feudal despotism and modern totalitarianism.
An American in Madrid. El Cid was made in Spain in 1960 by American film
producer Samuel Bronston. Bronston had come to Spain some years earlier to
make John Paul Jones (John Farrow, 1959) and stayed to produce the biblical epic,
The King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961). Much debate surrounds Bronston. Derek
Elley clearly identifies him as one of the “two great names” that the epic has given
to cinema history, Cecil B. De Mille being the other.25 Heston claims that Bronston
had “that rarest of all things, a new idea.”26
Bronston went to Spain, along with other American filmmakers, for primarily
financial reasons. United Artists, for example, shot Alexander the Great (Robert
Rossen, 1956) there as a way of spending profits that could not be exported. As
Peter Besas puts it, the logic of using Spain as a location was that “the dollars
[made there] couldn’t be taken out, but a film negative that might be worth millions could.’”27 Bronston’s innovation was not his choice of Spain as a location, but
rather his scheme to build a film empire there. Most significantly, he is attributed
with being the first producer to presell distribution rights for films on a territoryby-territory basis as a way of funding his projects, a scheme that became central to
the activities of later independent producers.
But even Bronston’s independents were not small-scale projects. The epics he
produced were for an international market, and, as Thomas Schatz has pointed
out, were all “big all-star projects, most of them shot on location.”28 Further, of the
five top-grossing movies of the 1950s, three were epics-Ben Hur, The Robe (Henry
Koster, 1953), and The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. De Mille, 1956)-and two
starred Charlton Heston, who played Rodrigo Dfaz de Vivar, the Cid, in Bronston’s
Super Technirama-70 production through MGM.29
Heston’s presence is not the only sign that El Cid was intended for an international market; the film also features Italian-born performers Sophia Loren and
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 83
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Figure 1. Roderigo (Charlton Heston) and his beloved, Chimene (Sophia Loren),
in opulent surroundings in El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1960). Loren’s presence in the
cast was designed to enhance the international appeal of the production. Courtesy
of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Raf Vallone, French-born actress Genevieve Page, and other international players, many of whom were British. Moreover, while the majority of the film was
filmed in Spain, Bronston created the illusion that at least some of it was filmed in
Italy. The credits make this claim, and in his autobiography Heston mentions that
Bronston kept offering his star a holiday in Italy. As it later transpired, the offer
was simply an attempt to get Heston on Italian soil so that it would look as if he had
been filming there.30 Bronston’s aim was to present the film as partly Italian so that
it would receive preferential treatment in the territory. The film even lists an alternative screenwriter for the “Italian Version,” suggesting that an alternative release
may have been produced for the Italian market, possibly with expanded roles for
the Italian players. However, Loren was not chosen simply with the Italian market
in mind. International audiences were also familiar with her. As Heston observes,
Loren was by this time not simply a star in Italy but “one of maybe half a dozen
women who’d become honest-to-God international stars.”3′
Nonetheless, the Spanish context of its production is not irrelevant to El Cid.
Indeed, the choice of subject had more to do with production issues than its consumption. Bronston hoped to build his own film studio in Spain and wanted to
involve the Spanish government in nurturing this project.”3
84 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
However, he did not want his scheme to appear to offer simply economic advantages. Although he knew a studio would provide jobs, attract foreign capital, and
make money, Bronston also wanted it to appear to be more than an American studio
abroad. He chose the Cid as the subject for his film to ensure that it looked as
though the studio would not just be employing Spanish personnel but also handling
“Spanish” subject matter. In this endeavor, Bronston was well aware that, in 1960,
Franco’s Spain was beginning to emerge from the extended period of austerity that
followed the Civil War and that even though the economy was beginning to flourish,
the government was worried about its international image.33 Bronston hoped that
the Franco government would welcome a film about a Spanish national hero and
that, given the centrality of the tourist trade to the revival of the Spanish economy,
images of the Spanish landscape would also prove attractive to those in power.a4
Bronston even went so far as to set up a Spanish company, Samuel Bronston
Espanola, not only to raise money in Spain but also to identify his productions
more clearly as Spanish productions rather than simply as American productions
filmed in Spain.
Mythology, Authenticity, and National Cinema. El Cid raises a whole series
of questions about cinema and nation. Nonetheless, most English-language books
on Spanish cinema, Peter Besas’s Behind the Spanish Lens being the notable exception,35 almost completely fail to mention Bronston’s productions.36 For example,
Virginia Higginbotham’s only reference to Bronston or El Cid identifies it not as a
Spanish film but as one of a series of “American super productions [that] were
made in Spain with little concern with quality or co-operation.”3′ She not only
ignores Bronston’s concern with identifying his film as Spanish and his frequently
discussed obsession with producing “quality” pictures, but also defines El Cid as a
“cultural humiliation,” in which “Spain’s national epic poem” was bastardized by
Hollywood. Higginbotham even quotes Marta Hernandez, who claimed that El
Cid was little more than “a medieval western.”38
Higginbotham’s reference runs the gamut of definitions of national cinema
identified by Andrew Higson,39 and, as usually happens, she slips between definitions to elide the problems and contradictions inherent in each of them. Thus, she
starts with issues of funding and finance, which then slip into issues of cooperation, given the problems of defining a film’s national origin on that basis. After all,
that much of Bronston’s funding came from French investors is not normally seen
as sufficient to define the films as French, and despite the fact that Japanese corporations now own several Hollywood studios, the films these studios produce are
rarely identified as Japanese.
Cooperation is also an imprecise term. Besas argues that Bronston tried to involve the Spanish government but that his productions were also central to the
training of “a whole generation of Spanish film technicians, who for the first time
had an opportunity to work on a continuous basis in the style of films made in Hollywood.”40 Films are often excluded from inclusion in national cinemas because of
the absence of government involvement but are not necessarily included simply
because of its presence. Indeed, the question is rarely involvement or absence per
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 85
se but the “right kind” of involvement. As is often pointed out, although the Star
Wars, Superman, Alien, and Indiana Jones series, along with a host of other films,
were made in Britain with largely British production crews, they are rarely identified as examples of British national cinema.4′
Higginbotham then turns to the question of audiences to suggest that the
“right kind” of involvement was lacking in El Cid. She suggests that as “a medieval
western,” the film betrayed its Spanish subject matter and therefore did not really
address a Spanish audience but an American one. However, Hollywood films were
often more commercially successful in Spain than other films with supposedly
more authentically Spanish subject. As a result, this definition is also problematic.
Higginbotham therefore finds it necessary to support her claim with the quote
from Marta Hernandez, which introduces what Higson refers to as the “critical
definition” of a national cinema. It shifts the issue from one of actual audiences to
a question of “quality,” so that the national cinema is identified not with popular
viewing habits but with a “selective tradition” or “legitimate culture” whose composition and boundaries are defined by an authoritative elite of government, media, and academic institutions.
This opposition between legitimate culture and the illegitimate “foreign” film
is policed by Higginbotham’s reference and by the suggestion that although the
film was “based on Spain’s national epic poem,” it was a perversion of that source.
Indeed, the claim that the film was based on the Poema de Mio Cid is a common
one, which even Charlton Heston repeated in his account of the film.42 However,
the film uses almost nothing of the poem. It does cover the exiling of the Cid by
Alfonso and the battles for Valencia, but these two elements are presented very
differently as to both their causes and their effects. For example, the film ends
with the defense of Valencia, where the Cid’s dead body leads his men into victory
against Ben Yussuf’s Islamic forces, but this episode is taken from a myth that was
developed some centuries after the writing of the Poema.43 Furthermore, in the
Poema, the battles for Valencia are merely one stage in the Cid’s rise to power, and
this epic ends not with his death but with a dispute over the dishonor done to his
two daughters by their husbands. At the close of the film, these daughters are still
young children. It is hardly surprising that both the poem and the film include the
exile and the battles for Valencia as these are the two most commonly recounted
aspects of the Cid’s mythic and historic narratives and hardly unique to the Poema.
Alternatively, Richard Fletcher has seen “the overall interpretation” in the film
as, “in its main lines,” that of the distinguished Spanish historian and scholar Ramon
Menendez Pidal.44 Again, Heston’s autobiography lends his authority to this claim.
He says he sought out the elderly historian and discussed the project with him.45
However, although the film does draw on a series of incidents that Pidal attributes
to the life of the Cid, the film makes important revisions and additions to Pidal’s
account, most significantly concerning the Cid’s relationship to the Islamic king of
Saragossa, Moutamin, and the film’s use of the entirely mythological ending. The
major similarity to Pidal’s classic work, The Cid and His Spain, is that, while Fletcher
defines this “history” as an attempt to “lovingly and reverently … resurrect as much
of the legend as was consistent with what he took to be existing scholarly criticism,”46
86 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
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Figure 2. The Cid (Charlton Heston) and a bearded ally on horseback in El Cid
(1960). The film’s battle scenes add to the epic spectacle. Courtesy of Wisconsin
Center for Film and Theater Research.
the film can be said to resurrect lovingly and reverently as much of the history as
was consistent with its own interpretations of the myths.
Rather than seeing the film as an accurate presentation of either the real historical character or the authentic Spanish myth, or, conversely, as an inaccurate
betrayal of either one, it is perhaps more useful to examine the ways in which the
film negotiates its way through a series of historical and mythological narratives
centered around the figure of the Cid and attempts to construct a coherent narrative out of a reinterpretation of these elements, a reinterpretation that was also
conditioned by its own historical period. As a result, it is important to emphasize,
as Marsha Kinder does, that no national cinema is ever simply produced or defined according to features purely unique, internal, and authentic to itself but always involves “transcultural reinscription” or “the ideological reinscription of
conventions that are borrowed from other cultures and set in conflict with each
other, a process of hybridization that is capable of carving out a new aesthetic
language.”47 To put it another way, it is perhaps less important to see El Cid as
either a Hollywood bastardization of the “authentic” Spanish myth or an authentic
example of Spanish national cinema than to examine the text as a hybrid consisting
of different elements.
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 87
It would be misleading to view the Cid as an exclusively Spanish myth. First,
the myth started to develop before there was an actual political or cultural entity
called “Spain,” and the Poema is concerned with the Cid as a Castilian or a Christian hero rather than as a national one. Second, the Cid myth has always been
subject to narrativization beyond the bounds of the area politically or culturally
defined as the nation “Spain” and was disseminated most widely by the French
dramatist Corneille, whose play Le Cid was first produced in Paris in 1637 and was
“enormously influential in the history of French drama and of European theatre in
general.”48 Third, El Cid (from the Arabic al-Said) was a very Moorish Spaniard,
just as Alexander the Great, born in Macedonia, was not fully Greek from birth
and Napoleon, born in Corsica, was a very Italian Frenchman.
Further, even within the confines of Spain, it is not possible to talk of the myth
of the Cid but only myths of the Cid. Just as with the figures of Robin Hood and
King Arthur in Britain, the stories surrounding the Cid have changed over time
and have been the subject of intense struggle even within a particular period. As a
result, as Fletcher has pointed out, while the Franco government made much of
the Cid as a national hero and remade him as a predecessor of Franco, with whom
he was often directly compared, and even while Pidal’s The Cid and His Spain
“became and long remained a set book for cadets at Spanish military academies,”
Pidal himself was persecuted by the government as a suspected dissident.49 The
meaning of the Cid was therefore never singular even during a particular period
but was itself a source of constant conflict and renegotiation as different groups
reappropriated the myth for their own ends. In short, there was no authentic myth
for the film to degrade, only a series of myths to be reworked and reinterpreted.
Fragmentation and Unification in El Cid. If, at a narrative level, El Cid is
concerned with building a coherent narrative out of a series of fragments, the
narrative that it constructs is concerned with similar processes. The film, unlike
the epic poem, is concerned with the Cid as a national, not a Castilian, hero who
works for the good of “all Spain.” But while he acts in the name of Spain, this
nation is presented as an entity that is as much a product of his act of naming it as
it is an entity that preexists that act of naming. As the film makes clear, the “Spain”
that exists prior to Rodrigo’s intervention is a “war-torn and unhappy land: half
Christian and half Moor.” It is not a nation in either political or cultural terms but
a series of small warring kingdoms that are divided by differences of politics, culture, and religion. However, as the contextualizing opening speech goes on to claim,
the Cid was a figure of unity who rose above “religious hatreds” and so enabled
different political, religious, and racial groups to come together in opposition to a
common enemy: the Almoravide invaders, an Islamic force from Morocco. In this
way, the film takes as its central narrative the forging of a sense of collective purpose in relation to an external other in a manner that is clearly developed as an
analogy for the Cold War.
This process is more complex than it might at first appear and involves a major
transformation in myths of the Cid, even contemporary versions associated with
the Franco government. Immediately after the opening speech, even before
88 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
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Figure 3. The mythic hero the Cid, depicted in a low-angle shot on an armored
horse. The Franco government valorized the Cid as a national icon and remade
him as a predecessor of Franco. Courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Rodrigo is introduced, the film introduces Ben Yussuf, the leader of the Almoravide
invaders. Ben Yussuf castigates the various Moorish kings of Spain, whom he has
gathered before him in preparation for his invasion, and accuses them of weakness-of producing poets and scientists, rather than warriors. Then, in a manner
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 89
that clearly evokes the domino theory of Russian expansion that was so prevalent
in the period, Yussuf asserts that the prophet has ordered them to rule the world
and declares that they will first sweep across Spain, then Europe, and finally the
world. This association with the Cold War is reinforced shortly afterward when
Moutamin tells Rodrigo of his fears for the future. He evokes the imagery and
anxieties surrounding nuclear warfare in the period: what is coming is “war, death,
and destruction: blood and fire more terrible than has been seen by living man.”
However, Islam is not simply posed against Christianity but rather liberalism
is pitted against totalitarianism. Indeed, completely recasting Rodrigo’s story, for
which I can find no historical precedent, he is cast as a liberal warrior whose fight
for Spain is clearly defined as a battle for religious and racial tolerance.
This is made clear in the very next sequence, in which Rodrigo as a character
is introduced. He has been interrupted on his way to marry his love, Chimene
(Sophia Loren), and has been forced to do battle with some Moorish raiders. He
has been victorious in battle, and he returns to his father’s estate with two Moorish
kings as prisoners. He is met by both his father and his later rival, Count Ordonez,
an emissary from the king who orders Rodrigo to hand over his prisoners for execution. Rodrigo refuses and decides that mercy rather than execution may be a
better way of dealing with the Moors. He has his prisoners swear not to attack the
lands of King Ferdinand of Castile, then releases them, an act that earns Rodrigo
the eternal friendship of one king, Moutamin of Saragossa; the name of the Cid
that Moutamin bestows upon him; and an accusation of treason against the crown.
This sequence sets the scene for the story that occupies most of the first half
of the film, in which Rodrigo kills Chim6ne’s father to defend his family honor
and thus alienates the woman whom he loves. This story does not appear in either the histories or the epic poem but rather is a feature of Corneille’s play,
which was itself derived from Spanish ballads from around the sixteenth century,
which were themselves based on the Mocedades de Rodrigo, which was composed sometime about 1300.
The significance of the conflict and its motivations are completely different in
the play and the film. In Corneille’s play, for example, Rodrigo’s father, Don Diego, clashes with Chim6ne’s father, Don Gormaz, over an honor bestowed upon
the former by the king, and Rodrigo is drawn into a foolish squabble between the
arrogant and boastful Don Gormaz and the doddering and ineffectual Don Diego.
In the film, Rodrigo “asks nothing for himself’ in his conflict with Don Gormaz
and is still motivated by a desire to defend his father’s honor. However, the role
played by his father is fundamentally different. As played by Michael Horden,
Don Diego is a wise liberal who trusts his son’s moral integrity (“Rodrigo knows
what he must do,” he informs Don Ordonez) and defends his son’s decision to
release the Moorish kings as an act of moral conviction rather than treason.
Thus, the central conflict in the film is not between Christianity and Islam but
between tolerance and intolerance-between acceptance of difference and desire
to impose conformity and obedience on others. In the film, Rodrigo finds Moutamin
a far more trustworthy ally than any other Christian, and they later declare that
both sides “have so much to give to each other and to Spain.” Leon Hunt has
90 Cinema Journanl 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
rightly commented on the way in which the masculinity embodied by the Cid is
presented not as known and familiar but as distinctly exceptional, mysterious, and
even uncanny. He has also noted the frequency with which the Cid is asked, usually by Alfonso, “What kind of a man are you?”50 Moutamin is the only figure who
is able to comprehend and understand the Cid and is even able to name him:
“Among our people we have a word for a warrior with the vision to be just and the
courage to be merciful. We call such a man El Cid.”
The film undermines the central aspect of the Francoist version of the Cid
legend, that Rodrigo is an unambiguous crusader against Islam. Indeed, Franco
clearly identified himself with the reconquest of Spain or the expulsion of the
Moors and likened this struggle to his own war against the forces of “anti-Spain,”
which he identified as socialism, Communism, and anti-Catholicism. What is more,
by presenting Spain as a country created out of an alliance between Moor and
Christian rather than out of a conflict between them (even though both fought
against a common Islamic enemy), the film also contested the Francoist emphasis
on the Spanish as a unique race and a people who were preoccupied with matters
of racial purity. These issues were made clear from the title of a prominent Spanish film based on a novel by Franco himself, Raza, or Race.
The contradiction is that in defending tolerance, the film not only presents its
own image of otherness-of that which cannot be tolerated (intolerance)-but also
associates tolerance with Christian symbolism. However, not just the Islamic tyrant
Ben Yussuf threatens Spain with his intolerance. Alfonso, the Christian king of
Castile, also is defeated by Ben Yussuf later in the film because he refuses to make
alliances with Moslems: “We are a Christian kingdom; we deal only with Christians.”
The freeing of the Moorish kings and the conflict with Chim6ne’s father also
raises another theme: the Cid as a figure of moral integrity who is driven to do the
right thing despite the problems it causes him, most significantly in his relationship with King Alfonso. Notably, once Rodrigo has killed Chim6ne’s father, the
film moves on to the conflict between Sancho and Alfonso, the sons of the Castillian
king, Ferdinand. On his death, Ferdinand divides the kingdom between his sons,
but they are unhappy with this arrangement and go to war with each other in an
attempt to gain possession of the whole kingdom. In actuality, Ferdinand had three
sons and two daughters, not, as in the film, two sons and one daughter.
In the poems, as in history, Rodrigo supported Sancho; in the film, he is above
the conflict. When Sancho sentences Alfonso to imprisonment, the Cid rescues
Alfonso and claims that Sancho is acting against “God’s law.” But when Alfonso
asks the Cid to take his side, Rodrigo claims that he cannot side with either brother
without losing faith with the other. He sees the dispute as divisive and therefore
dangerous, and he calls for reconciliation instead.
As in both history and legend, Sancho is murdered, thus allowing Alfonso to
assume the position of king of Leon and Castile. At this point, the film does utilize
Pidal’s history by accepting a story found in the ballads in which the Cid forces
Alfonso to swear that he had no part in his brother’s killing. However, the story also
suggests that it was this act of defiance that alienated him from the king and brought
about his exile.
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 91
Fletcher considers the story of the oath to be “fantastic,” and even in Pidal’s
account, it is not the cause of the Cid’s exile.51 More usually it is attributed to
political wrangles within Alfonso’s court in which courtiers such as Don Ordonez
were supposed to have poisoned the king against Rodrigo, who was accused of
withholding tribute from the king. In the film, the Cid is exiled for insisting that
Alfonso give his oath, and the struggle is converted from one of political intrigue to
yet another presentation of the Cid as a figure of moral integrity who stands up to
an immoral, willful, and despotic monarch. Rodrigo insists on the oath because, he
claims, without it Alfonso’s kingdom will be fragmented by doubt and suspicion.
Rodrigo is therefore once again shown to be the force for cohesion against the
dangerously divisive power of a king who rules tyrannically rather than by asserting moral leadership.
The moral courage the Cid displays is also seen as repairing the rift between
himself and Chim6ne, who follows him into exile. Her faith is further confirmed
when she watches him tend to and bless a leper who identifies himself as Lazarus.
This scene not only presents the Cid as an almost Christlike figure of purity, charity, and self-sacrifice, a recurring motif in the film, it also draws on the ballads in
which Rodrigo encounters a leper who is revealed to be St Lazarus.
The reconciliation with Chimene is presented as a brief moment of peace when,
finally, through the loss of their previous duties, they are able to consummate their
love for one another. However, this moment is almost immediately interrupted. As
Chim6ne and Rodrigo dream of finding a “hidden place” where they can live together in peace, tranquility, and anonymity, Rodrigo’s men are gathering outside. If
Alfonso is unable to establish himself as a moral leader, Rodrigo does. If, however,
they are willing to fightfor the Cid, the Cid invokes a higher cause: “Spain.”
Historians generally agree that the Cid’s years in exile were spent mostly as a
mercenary in the service of Moutamin of Saragossa, who was his employer, not his
lifelong friend. The film conveniently skips over this period in Rodrigo’s life and
when it resumes, the movie suggests that Rodrigo spent the intervening years campaigning against the Moroccan invaders, allied with non-Christian kings.
Monarch and Subject: Oedipal Tensions and Cold War Discourse. The
second half of the film openswith the Cid arriving with these non-Christian kings
at the Catalan court, to which he has been recalled by Alfonso, who wants Rodrigo
to join him in a battle against Ben Yussuf to take place at Sagrajas. This sequence
operates on several levels. It is at this moment that Alfonso displays his bigotry and
intolerance toward the non-Christian kings, but it is also the point when the function of Valencia changes within the narratives of the Cid, hence altering the Cid’s
motivation to conquer it. In the poems and other accounts, the battle for Valencia
is about either power and wealth or the expansion of Christianity. In the film, the
battle is of strategic significance in the war against Ben Yussuf, and it becomes the
equivalent of Thermopylae in 300 Spartans,52 a site that must be taken and held at
any cost so as to prevent Ben Yussuf from landing his armada and overrunning the
whole of Spain. In fact, the Cid turned to Valencia only after he had both reconciled with the king and once again fallen out of favor after failing to rendezvous
92 Cinema Journal n40, No. 1, Fall 2000
with Alfonso prior to another battle (this misdeed seems to have been a mistake
rather than a principled stand).
Fletcher convincingly argues that not only was the battle for Valencia fought
for wealth and power, rather than as a strategic move against the Almoravide invasion, but that it resulted in a territorial conflict with Alfonso. In the film, the Cid
takes Valencia in Alfonso’s name, even though the king has imprisoned Alfonso’s
wife and daughters and threatened to kill them. This story comes primarily from
Pidal’s history, although the claim that the Cid captured Valencia for Alfonso is in
a range of texts, including the Poema. Unfortunately, as Fletcher has shown, not
only did the Cid seem to have approved references in which he was described as
the prince of Valencia, but he also fought Alfonso and his allies in order to keep
hold of his title.53
The film ends with the siege of Valencia and Alfonso’s final conversion, when
he receives the crown of Valencia from the Cid and is humbled by the Cid’s faithfulness. Throughout the film, Alfonso is played much as Pidal described him, as a
spoiled and decadent monarch, but the film adds that he is virtually a troubled
teenager. Again and again, he is shown trying to prove his manhood, and, as a
result, his relationship to the Cid is presented as one of Oedipal tension. To Alfonso,
the Cid is an ideal of masculinity that Alfonso cannot comprehend and against
which he feels inadequate. In response, Alfonso develops a hatred for the Cid,
which he uses sadistically to assert his legal authority and superiority in an attempt
to undermine Rodrigo. This is borne out by the fact that the Cid challenges Alfonso’s
“childish” desires for omnipotence. In this way, the relationship between the men
involves the classic sadomasochistic dynamics of the epic in which men often slip
between identification (the will to be like the other), desire (the will to possess the
other and/or to be possessed by him), and hatred (the will to distance oneself from
the other through his degradation or destruction).
However, the film also reinterprets this conflict. The Poema, for example, has
been read as a complex meditation on the reciprocal duties of lord and vassal, but
in the film the conflict is instead presented as between despotism and the moral
bourgeois individual. Again and again, the Cid’s conflict develops out of his refusal
to surrender his own moral integrity and judgment to the dictates of the monarch,
a theme that was highly popular in historical dramas of the period. Indeed, while
Heston was shooting the Valencia sections of the film, Lawrence Olivier phoned
to ask Heston if he would appear on stage with him in Beckett. This play focuses
on a similarly defined conflict between Henry II and the “troublesome priest,”
Thomas a Becket, and became the basis for a film starring Richard Burton and
Peter O’Toole, released a few years after El Cid, in 1964. However, El Cid was
made in the same year as another play based on this theme, Robert Bolt’s A Man
for All Seasons. The play, which centers on the refusal of Thomas More to surrender his moral integrity and judgment to the will of King Henry VIII, is one that has
practically obsessed Heston. As the actor himself admitted: “Robert Bolt’s exploration of the heroic resistance and tragic fall of Thomas More was the best play I’d
seen in years. Now, thirty years later, I’ve done the play five times and filmed it
once; I still don’t know any play written in the period that’s as good.”54
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 93
The significance of this narrative in the period is perhaps best clarified through
a comparison with yet another play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Miller’s play is
usually read as a critique of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of
the 1950s, but it developed this critique through the opposition between liberalism and totalitarianism-individual moral autonomy and collective conformitywhich was so much a part of the rhetoric of the political left, right, and center in
the Cold War period.
Beckett, El Cid, and A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966) all repeat
this central conflict but shift the threat from the conformist collective in Miller’s
play to that of the feudal despot. Both narratives associate the threat with a historical past from which bourgeois democracy is presented as a break and, in the process, present contemporary totalitarianism not as a product of modernity, but as
the resurrection of archaic and outmoded forms to which bourgeois democracy
not only offers a solution but is inherently superior. Hence, the Oedipal narrative
is not the product of an ahistorical patriarchal unconscious but a product of Cold
War discourses that, although not exclusively American, did enable America to
cast itself in the central role.55 In the context of the Cold War, America was often
presented as an ideal, even universal, subject whose national origins and identity
were formed through a rejection of the feudal and despotic rule of the British
crown. This presentation also cast the Soviet Union as an archaic and moribund
hangover of an earlier stage of development.56 As a result, America was able to cast
itself much like the film’s version of the Cid, as a universal subject able to unify the
warring and divided peoples of the world and so contain a common enemy.
The use of these rhetorics and discourses should not, however, be taken to
imply that El Cid was innately conservative. It should be remembered that the political left, right, and center used these discourses to different ends. Indeed, as has
already been argued, the cause of liberalism is carefully constructed in the film as a
call for racial equality at a time when civil rights was not yet fashionable in white
America. Bronston picked up this cause even more forcefully and directly in his
collaboration with director Anthony Mann on The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
In El Cid, the hero does not displace the despotic monarch or even win a
moral victory over him, as does Spartacus in the film of the same name. Instead,
he succeeds in reforming the monarch. But, although the Cid refuses to surrender
his moral integrity or judgment to the monarch, he is nonetheless a faithful defender of the crown and always acts in his best interests, even if he acts against
Alfonso’s wishes. As a result, when the Cid finally refuses to accept the crown of
Valencia for himself and instead has it presented to Alfonso, Alfonso finds that he
has run out of options. He realizes that he will never prove himself superior to the
Cid by trying to degrade and destroy him. He will only succeed in further confirming the Cid’s moral superiority. Alfonso decides to “make [him]self a king” by emulating the Cid and travels to Valencia to humble himself before his hero and declare
his support for him. But the Cid will have none of this-“My King kneels before
no man!” he states emphatically–and, at any rate, the Cid is also dying. Alfonso is
therefore positioned as the Cid’s successor. Despotism is associated with immaturity57 or even juvenile delinquency and Alfonso is presented as a despot who has
94 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
finally grown up and achieved manhood. As the Cid puts it, “It is not easy for a
man to conquer himself. You have done that.” Rodrigo clearly presents Alfonso’s
conversion as an Oedipal rite of passage: “I have not failed; Spain has a king!”
Naming, Representation, and the Contradictions of Masculinity. Alfonso
becomes not only both an adult and a “good” king but also the king of Spain. As
such, he replaces the Cid as the representative of national unity. This presents
distinct problems for the film, however, which it never quite manages to reconcile.
If the Cid became the figure of unity who brought various political, religious, and
racial groups together and so created a unity in difference, in making Alfonso the
king of Spain, the movie changes the nature of that unity and implicitly displaces
the non-Christian kings who have declared allegiance to the Cid. As Moutamin
almost prophetically says earlier in the film when he tries to persuade Rodrigo to
declare himself the ruler of Valencia, “We have given up everything for you; we
implore you to take the crown.” By the end of the film, Alfonso may have become
a good king, but by naming him the king, the Cid has implicitly shifted the terms
of Spanish unity. No longer is the emphasis on unity in difference but on the dominance of the Castillian state.
As Alfonso leads his troops into battle the following morning with the dead
body of the Cid by his side, he alters the Cid’s cry of “for God, Alfonso, and Spain”
to “for God, the Cid, and Spain.” As a result, while, at one level, the film seems to
be an Oedipal rite of passage for Alfonso with the Cid as a representative father
figure, on another level it tells of the Cid’s Oedipal rite of passage in which Alfonso
finally validates and endorses the Cid’s actions as representative of a father figure.
Alfonso’s last words to Chim ne are “I want you and my children to remember me
riding with my King … tomorrow.” Of course, he knows that tomorrow he will be
dead, although he may attain mythic status in the process.
Indeed, the ending of the film directly addresses the process of mythologization,
in which the Cid rides “out of history and into legend.” In so doing, it focuses on
one of the central tensions in the film, the problem of naming and representation whereby the living Rodrigo becomes the mythic hero, the Cid, and the
warring and divided series of kingdoms become a nation, Spain. Talking of the
film later in life, director Anthony Mann emphasized the significance and centrality of this ending: “I started with the final scene. This lifeless knight who is
strapped into the saddle of his horse … It’s an inspirational scene. The film
flowed from this source.””58
Leon Hunt also comments upon the significance of this scene and the ways in
which the conversion of Rodrigo into the Cid “is only made possible by the death
of the human subject.”59 Thus, while Rodrigo is presented as a figure of moral
integrity, he is also presented as split or divided, unable to resolve the conflict
between his public responsibilities and his private desires. From the start, his need
to defend his “name” forces him to kill Don Gormaz and so destroys his hope of
domestic happiness, a theme that is repeated as different public responsibilities
conspire to separate him from the love for which he yearns. After killing Don
Gormaz, Rodrigo even acknowledges the shape of his future dilemmas when he
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 95
and Chimene admit their inability to “kill” their desires for one another, even when
these desires contradictheir public duties:
RODRIGO: I told my love that it had no right to live. But my love won’t die.
CHIMENE: Kill it!
RODRIGO: You kill it: tell me that you don’t love me.
CHIMENE: I cannot-not yet. But I will make myself worthy of you, Rodrigo: I will
learn to hate you.
Later, when Rodrigo and Chimene are reconciled, other duties and responsibilities intrude and they fantasize a “hidden place” where they will be anonymouswithout names-able to live in peace and tranquility together. But this can only be
a fantasy, as Chimene points out, for there can be no place where they will also be
able to hide from themselves.
This contradiction reaches crisis point during the siege on Valencia when the
Cid receives word that Alfonso has captured Chim ne and the children. This news
places him in an intolerable position. If the Cid continues to fight to defend Spain
and takes Valencia, he endangers his family, but if he marches on Alfonso, he leaves
Spain vulnerable to invasion. Caught in an impossible dilemma, the film presents
him riding around and around in circles, asking repeatedly, “May I not sometimes
think of my wife and children? What must I do?” If this sequence casts him in a
traditional patriarchal role in relation to both the public and the private spheres, it
also reveals the painful and destructive contradictions of this division for its masculine subjects. The film is able to resolve this dilemma only through external intervention: Don Ordonez decides to rescue Chim6ne himself and joins with the Cid.
However, Rodrigo is not just required to live up to the name of the Cid. He is
frequently split by the act of standing in for or representing other names. Again and
again, he acts “for his father,” “for Spain,” “for Alfonso,” or “for God.” He is therefore not permitted to be “himself’ (whatever that might be) but is frequently present
in place of an absent other, frequently a nonexistent entity that he hopes to construct through representation: the act of naming and embodying. For example, the
names of both Spain and Alfonso that Rodrigo invokes are ideals, the first having no
concrete existence but simply being something to be named and constructed, the
second, having no relation to the living person of the king but simply being a position that Rodrigo hopes to construct by standing in place of that which is absent,
embodying its values, and hence providing an example in the process.
Rodrigo even has to literally stand in for God. Not only is he frequently identified as God’s representative-“God sent you to us,” he is told by a priest near the
beginning of the film-but after Don Ordonez allies himself with the Cid and is
captured by Ben Yussuf, he claims that the Cid is “not like other men” and that he
will therefore “never die.” Ben Yussuf, of course, sees the significance of this claim
and asks, “You dare to think of him the way we think of the prophet …. Then this
will be more than a battle; it will be our God against yours.” Through Ben Yussuf’s
comparison with the prophet Muhammad, the Cid is therefore presented not only
as God’s representative on earth but, more literally, as Jesus Christ himself. He
even has to go through the act of dying and resurrection to achieve his mission.
96 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
If, earlier, the Cid had been a unifying factor through the example of his own
moral integrity, by the end only his physical presence as an image is necessary.
Wounded by an arrow (much like the statue of Jesus that he saves at the opening
of the film and even straps to a horse), he knows that he must lead his men into
battle the next morning if he is to defeat Ben Yussuf and that only his physical
presence as an image will bring his men together and inspire them to victory. However, his wound makes him unable to perform this role as a living being and he
decides to give up his life so that the image of his corpse can fulfill this function.
Furthermore, the image of his dead body not only inspires his men to victory but
also almost single-handedly destroys the opposition by inspiring fear in them. The
very presence of his physical image routs the Almoravide forces and reduces Ben
Yussuf to immobility as his fanaticism is converted into disbelief and his inert body
is literally trampled to death under the hooves of the Cid’s advancing forces.
The Cid’s divided nature is essential to his function as a hero. While it is common to see male heroes as “ego ideals” who exist as images of presence, unity, and
omnipotence,60 the Cid, like many male heroes, is heroic exactly because of the
struggle that he embodies. Without the sense of contradiction, agony, and selfdoubt, the male subject becomes not a heroic agent but a mindless robotic functionary, the conformist zombie whom the bourgeois democratic imagination,
particularly in the period of the Cold War, identified as the subject of feudal despotism and modern totalitarianism.
As such, El Cid can be seen both as a product of Cold War discourses and as
demonstrating the complexities and contradictions of these discourses. The film
ultimately offers both a heroic image of nationalism and democratic masculinity
and emphasizes the contradictions and costs on which they depend.
Conclusion. This article has tried to demonstrate that El Cid is the product of
hybridization in which different cultural materials, from different national contexts, have been integrated with one another and transformed in the process. This
is particularly clear because of El Cid’s specific conditions of production, but it is,
arguably, also true of all cultural texts. No text is ever simply the product of an
authentic, coherent, and unique national culture. On the contrary, films are part
of the process through which struggles over the definition of national cultures are
fought. In other words, the inclusion or exclusion of certain films with respect to
specific definitions of national cinema tells us more about the power relations
within which these definitions operate than they do about some inherent feature
of these films’ production, their formal features, or their consumption. Furthermore, as we have also seen, texts are also involved in the production of certain
notions of nationhood. El Cid not only tells a story of the formation of a nation but
it also constructs that history in specific ways. It presents a teleological history of
nationhood in which liberal democracies, and specific constructions of masculine
subjectivity associated with them, are privileged over other alternatives. This is
not to say that the film is inherently conservative. Liberal democracy is not a monolith object but is itself a site of struggle between violently opposed groups. If the
film does privilege liberal constructions of politics and masculinity, this does not
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 97
mean that it is uncritical of alternative appropriations of liberalism or is unaware
of the contradictions and costs of liberalism as an ideology.
Notes
The author wishes to thank Dorinda Hartmann, one of Cinema Journal’s fine photo editors, for locating and selecting the illustrations that accompany this essay.
1. See, for example, Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in
Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Sumiko Higashi,
“Antimodernism as Historical Representation in a Consumer Culture: Cecil B. De
Mille’s The Ten Commandments, 1923, 1956, 1993,” in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modemrn Event (New York: Routledge,
1996), 91-125; Alan Nadel, “God’s Law and the Widescreen: The Ten Commandments
as Cold War ‘Epic,’” in Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism,
and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 90-116; Stephen
Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980); Vivian Sobchack, “‘Surge and
Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,” in Barry K. Grant,
ed., The Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Michael Wood,
America in the Movies, or “Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind” (London: Secker
and Warburg, 1975); and Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema,
and History (London: Routledge, 1997).
2. Much of this work draws on ideas developed by Laura Mulvey in her classic article
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol.
2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 303-15.
3. Neale, Genre.
4. These ideas draw upon David Bordwell’s work in Narration and the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1988).
5. See, for example, Steve Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans:
Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus,” in Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London Routledge, 1992),
151-72; Leon Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made Of?’: Spartacus, El Cid, and the Male
Epic,” in Pat Kirkham and Janet Tumin, eds., Me Tarzan: Men, Movies, and Masculinity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993); 65-83; Mark Jancovich, “‘Charlton Heston
Is an Axiom’: Spectacle and Performance in the Development of the Blockbuster,” in
Andy Willis, ed., Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, forthcoming); and Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Genre, Gender, and the Action Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1992).
6. Tony Bennett and Janet Woolacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987).
7. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies.
8. See, for example, Hark, “Animals or Romans.”
9. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge,
1992), and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(London: Methuen, 1986).
10. This kind of analysis often draws on Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women,
Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), and Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male
Bodies (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). It has been more clearly developed in relation to
contemporary spectacles of the male body on film. See, for example, Claudia Springer,
98 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1996), and Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the
Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
11. Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror, 24.
12. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsche,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David
Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Free
Press, 1957).
13. Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (London:
Victor Gollanczs, 1963), 37.
14. Although they are very different, see Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (London: Pluto, 1983); Cohan,
Masked Men; and Nadel, Containment Culture.
15. Dwight Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1969).
16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London:
Routledge, 1984), 271.
17. Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 54.
18. Bourdieu, Distinction, 365.
19. Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald on Movies, 424.
20. As Bruce Babbington and Peter Evans argue, “We should not forget-leaving aside
the genre’s many nominations in most fields-that Ben Hur and Spartacus won Best
Picture Awards, that Charlton Heston and Hugh Griffith gained acting awards for
their roles in Ben Hur and Spartacus and Peter Ustinov for his in Quo Vadis, and that
Wyler was given Best Director award for Ben Hur.” Babbington and Evans, Biblical
Epics: Sacred Narrative in Hollywood Cinema (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993), 7.
21. For a discussion of the problematic status of published materials on reception, see Mark
Jancovich, “Genre and the Audience: Genre Classifications and Cultural Distinctions in
the Mediation of The Silence of the Lambs,” in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds.,
Hollywood and Cultural Identity (London: British Film Institute, forthcoming).
22. This concern with Oedipal narratives in the Cold War period does not necessarily
assume that these narratives are a fundamental structure of all patriarchal societies.
On the contrary, as Robert J. Corber has emphasized, one of the problems with many
forms of psychoanalytic film theory is that they were developed in relation to films of
the Cold War epoch, when psychoanalysis was being put to specific ideological uses.
Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political
Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1993). In other words, this article is more concerned with the functioning of Oedipal
narratives in American culture during a specific era than with reproducing the assumption that Oedipal narratives are a metadiscourse that can be used to make all
films intelligible. See my critique of Screen theory in Joanne Hollows and Mark
Jancovich, eds., Approaches to Popular Film (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995).
It is particularly interesting in this regard to consider Marsha Kinder’s work on the
Spanish Oedipal narrative. See her Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). While she accepts that
“the Oedipal drama” is “reenacted in every generation because it is the primary means
of transforming the small animal into a human gendered subject,” she emphasizes the
need to pay attention to “its distinctive cultural reinscription” within the context of
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 99
Spanish culture (197). Indeed, her claims may explain elements of the film that are
marginalized by my account and that might lead us to conclude that the film had a
substantially different resonance in Spanish culture.
Kinder notes, for example, that the father is often absent or idealized and that the
patriarchal mother comes to function as both the figure of repression and the target of
the children’s hostility. She also notes that patricide, if attempted, “is usually performed
by the daughter” rather than by the son (198). It is therefore interesting that, in El Cid,
Alfonso’s Oedipal problems are rooted in his probably incestuous relationship with his
sister, Uracca. Furthermore, she is presented as a sadist who not only controls her
brother but clearly desires the Cid and wants to destroy him because this desire is unrequited. In this way, she operates both as the patricidal daughter and as the repressive
material figure that takes the father’s place in the Spanish Oedipal narrative. These
elements might suggest that the film bears the trace of its multiple cultural contexts and
that elements in the film might have very different meanings in the Spanish context.
As I have argued elsewhere, we need to be aware that not only does any reading of
a text at best only identify certain preferred meanings, but also that the meanings of
texts as specific historically produced utterances exceed these particular readings and
are subject to continual reinterpretation as these texts pass into new historical and
cultural contexts. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, “David Morley, The Nationwide
Studies,” in Martin Barker and Anne Beezer, eds., Reading into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), 134-47; Mark Jancovich, Horror (London: Batsford, 1992);
Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Hollows and Jancovich, Approaches to Popular Film; and Jancovich,
“Genre and the Audience.”
23. See, for example, Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and Stephen Neale,
“Masculinity as Spectacle,” in Cohan and Hark, Screening the Male, 9-20.
24. As I have argued elsewhere, however, this Other was as internal as it was external. See,
for example, Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1996), and “Othering Conformity in Post-War
America: Intellectuals, the New Middle Classes, and the Problem of Cultural Distinctions,” in Nathan Abrams and Julie Hughes, eds., Containing America (Birmingham,
U.K.: Birmingham University Press, forthcoming).
See also Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the
Fifties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955); Daniel Boorstin, The Image: Or What Happened
to the American Dream (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962); Betty Friedan, The
Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958); Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems
of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Vintage, 1956); Greenberg, “Avant-Garde
and Kitsche”; Michael Harrington, The Other America (New York: Macmillan, 1962);
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962);
Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain; Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,”
in Advertisements for Myself (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959), 281-302; C Wright Mills,
White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); C.
Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); C. Wright
Mills, “On the New Left,” in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, eds., The New Radicals
(Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966), 107-20; Vance Packard, The Hidden
Persuaders (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1957); Vance Packard, The Status Seekers:
An Exploration of Class Behavior in America (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1959);
1 00 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The
Politics of Freedom (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1949); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The
Politics of Hope (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964); William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1956); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New
York: Rinehart, 1942); Philip Wylie, “The Abdicating Male … and How the Gray Flannel Mind Exploits Him through His Women,” Playboy, November 1956, 23-24, 50, 79;
and Philip Wylie, “The Womanization of America: An Embattled Male Takes a Look at
What Was Once a Man’s World,” Playboy, September 1958, 51-52, 77-79.
Studies of this period that I have found particularly useful include Alison J. Clarke,
“Tupperware: Suburbia, Sociality and Mass Consumption,” in Roger Silverstone, ed.,
Visions of Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997), 132-60; Cohan, Masked Men; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (London: Pluto, 1983); Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of
the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985); Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of
Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Karal Ann Marling, As
Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in
the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, NotJune Cleaver:
Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1994); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988);
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge,
1989); and Lynne Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Other studies include, Biskind, Seeing Is Believing; Paul Boyer, By the Bombs’ Early
Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s
Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Corber, In the Name
of National Security; Carl Degler, Affluence and Anxiety: America since 1945 (Glenview,
Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1975); John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War
and Peace, 1941-1960 (New York: Norton, 1989); James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945-1985 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1986); David Halberstam, The Fifties
(New York: Villard, 1993); William Leuchtenberg, A Troubled Feast: American Society
since 1945 (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1983); George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Lary
May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1995); William O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960 (New York:
Free Press, 1986); Ronald J. Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York:
Dembner, 1990); Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity
in the United States since 1938 (New York: Penguin, 1980); Janice Radway, “On Gender
of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 93, no. 4 (fall 1994): 871-94; Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan,
the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial,
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000 101
1982); Ed Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold
War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold
War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1978).
25. Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge, 1984), 6.
26. Charlton Heston, In the Arena: The Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 239.
27. Peter Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens (Denver: Arden, 1985), 54.
28. Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Jim Collins et al., eds., Film Theory Goes to
the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993), 13.
29. See Nadel, Containment Culture.
30. Heston, In the Arena.
31. Ibid., 249.
32. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens.
33. For studies of Spanish history and culture, see, for example, Raymond Carr, Modern
Spain 1875-1980 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Helen Graham
and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for
Modernity (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1995).
34. Of course, Bronston’s earlier films had also used the Spanish landscape, but these
scenes had been attributed to other places. For example, in King of Kings, Spain doubled
for Israel.
35. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens.
36. See, for example, Virginia Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco (Austin: University of Texas Press); John Hopewell, Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: British Film Institute, 1986); and Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction
of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
37. Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco, 16.
38. Marta Hernandez, quoted in Higginbotham, Spanish Film under Franco, 16.
39. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (autumn 1989):
36-46.
40. Besas, Behind the Spanish Lens, 53.
41. However, these films are sometimes defined as British, but this only further illustrates
that definitions of national cinema are more about the inevitably contradictory processes through which films are classified, rather than some internal feature of the films
themselves. For more on the contradictory ways in which these films have been defined, see Martyn Auty, “If the United States Spoke Spanish, We Would Have a Film
Industry … ,” in Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick, eds., British Cinema Now (London:
British Film Institute, 1985), 6, 11.
42. Heston, In the Arena.
43. For scholarship on the Poema and other Cid narratives, see “Introduction,” in Corneille,
Le Cid (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1975); Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid; J. Y.
Gibson, trans., The Cid Ballads (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber, 1898); Graham and Labanyi, Spanish Cultural Studies; W. D. Howarth, Le Cid (London: Grant
and Cutler, 1988); Ian Michael, The Poem of the Cid (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, 1975); Ramon Mendendez Pidal, The Cid and His Spain (London:
John Murray, 1934); Colin Smith, ed., Spanish Ballads (Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon,
1964); Colin Smith, ed., El Poema de Mio Cid (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1972); Peter Such and John Hodgkinson, “Introduction,” The Poem of My Cid (Warminster,
U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1987); and Roger Wright, Spanish Ballads (London: Grant
and Culliver 1991).
102 Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000
44. Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 5.
45. Heston, In the Arena.
46. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 201.
47. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 11.
48. Such and Hodgkinson, “Introduction,” in The Poem of My Cid, 34.
49. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 204-5.
50. Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made of?”‘ 65.
51. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, 118.
52. In fact, a series of films emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s that revolved around
similar conflicts: 300 Spartans (1962), The Alamo (1960), Khartoum (1966), and even
Zulu (1964). In each, a small force is compelled to hold a strategic location against impossible odds, and usually sacrifices itself so that victory may be achieved at a later point.
53. Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid.
54. Heston, In the Arena, 358.
55. It is worth pointing out that Beckett was written by the French writer, Jean Anouilh,
and that Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man for All Seasons, was English.
56. See, for example, Daniel Bell, “America as a Mass Society: A Critique,” in The End of
Ideology, and W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Development: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
57. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich’s discussion of “maturity” in The Hearts of Men
and my use of it in Rational Fears.
58. “Conversation with Anthony Mann,” Framework 15/16/17 (summer 1981): 19.
59. Hunt, “‘What Are Big Boys Made Of?”‘ 74.
60. See, for example, Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” and Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle.”
Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000

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