Trivia / El Cid

• Backed by the Pentagon: 1,700 trained infantrymen were leased from the Spanish Army as well as 500 mounted riders from Madrid's Municipal Honor Guard.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Charlton Heston was not overly impressed by the finished film, suggesting in his 1995 autobiography In the Arena that the film might have been better if William Wyler had directed it instead of Anthony Mann.
  • Miklos Rozsa learned at the premiere that 20% of his score was cut from the final film. He never worked with producer Samuel Bronston again.
  • Historical consultant Ramón Menéndez-Pidal felt completely ignored and hated that his name was not taken off the credits.
• Fake Nationality: Charlton Heston plays a Spanish folk hero. His wife is played by Sophia Loren, an Italian; and the rest of the cast is mostly British, Italian, and French actors.
• Falsely Advertised Accuracy: Famed Spanish historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal, considered to be the authority on El Cid back in the day, was famously hired as the production's historical advisor, something that was boasted in the Spanish print's credits... only to have just about each and every one of his notes completely ignored in favor of telling a story that's mostly fictional.
• Hostility on the Set: Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren didn't get on. Part of the reason could be that Loren was paid more than Heston (one million dollars, the first time a woman had been paid that sum for acting in a single motion picture). As can be seen in the finished film, during many of the "love" scenes, Heston refused to look at Loren for more than a glance. Anthony Mann tried take after take, imploring Heston to look into the eyes of the woman he was supposed to love, but Heston couldn't bring himself to do it. Regarding his deathbed scene, he later claimed that he was "looking into the future," rather than into the eyes of his wife. The animosity apparently even lasted after the film was made, or at least long enough that Heston turned down the male lead role in The Fall of the Roman Empire since it would've meant to have worked with Loren again, but later on Heston said he regretted the way he behaved towards Loren during filming, feeling in retrospect that he'd been unprofessional and unfair to her and wished he'd been kinder and less stubborn.
• No Dub for You:
  • Interestingly enough, the live-action film was never dubbed in Latin American Spanish (outside a very obscure dub done in Colombia, and very likely was never released), since the European Spanish dub was used instead there. This is likely intentional, due to the very Spaniard setting of the film and the fact the movie itself is based in one of the most famous works of Spanish literature of all time which was originally written in Medieval Spanish, so a Latin American dub would sound out of place here.
  • On the other hand, the animated film was indeed dubbed in Argentina.
• Troubled Production: The film was one of two separate El Cid films that went into development concurrently, the other was a Spanish co-production set to star Anthony Quinn. Production had to be halted when one of its producers sued Samuel Bronston to halt production of the Heston film, and was only resolved after Bronston agreed to give them a producing credit. As a result, part of the film's financing came from Francisco Franco's fascist regime, which heavily promoted the film as a work of nationalist propaganda.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jeanne Moreau was considered for Doña Ximena. Ava Gardner was approached for the role, but she backed out feeling Heston's part was bigger than hers.
  • The part of Ben Yussuf was originally offered to Orson Welles, but he insisted a double do his on-set performance while he would dub in his lines during post-production. Bronston refused.
  • Sean Connery was offered the role of García Ordóñez. He turned it down in favour of a production of Naked at Oxford with his then-wife Diane Cilento.

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