The Middle Ages and the Movies by Robert Bartlett

Author:Robert Bartlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Urraca and King Alfonso, who have spurned El Cid and the Muslim kings he brings as allies.

The critical turning point in Alfonso’s development is the moment that the Cid’s loyal servant Fáñez brings the crown of Valencia to Alfonso and Urraca. The king cannot believe this gesture. Urraca rejects Fáñez’s plea to bring help to the Cid and, kneeling in front of her brother, holds out the crown to him. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘now you are also king of Valencia.’ ‘I am king of nothing!’, he replies, brutally knocking her to the floor. Dashing out, he cries, ‘I will make myself a king!’ Urraca is left alone in the empty chamber. The next time we see Alfonso, more than twenty minutes later, he is leading his troops into Valencia to bring help to the dying Cid. In the last minutes of the film, as the Cid’s dead body leads the charge out of Valencia, Alfonso is on one side, Moutamin on the other. Alfonso’s rejection of dependence on his sister is accompanied by this conversion to multiculturalism. His masculine independence and his status as the nation’s leader have both been vindicated. Incidentally, John Fraser, who played Alfonso, gave in his autobiography, Close Up (2004), a frank (and very well written) account of what it was like to be a homosexual working in the film industry when open acknowledgement of his sexuality would have meant damage to, perhaps even the end of, his career.

After El Cid has freed Alfonso by defeating thirteen of Sancho’s men, who are escorting him to prison, Alfonso looks at him in amazement. ‘What kind of man are you?’, he asks. Later, when El Cid sends him the crown of Valencia, he again asks, ‘What kind of man is this?’ This is the question, isn’t it? He is the kind of man who will fight for his family’s honour, who can love a woman deeply, who is never underhand, who believes that differences of religion are not important when it comes to love of one’s country. Writing his autobiography more than thirty years after the film was made, Charlton Heston described El Cid ‘driving the Moors out of Spain’, which, if by ‘Moors’ he means Spanish Muslims, was exactly what the film shows him not doing. This formulation, which was only given as a casual aside, probably reflects less the actor’s well-known shift to the conservative wing of politics than the natural human tendency to revert to simplistic cliché in preference for complex analysis (the respected film critic David Thomson, writing in 2008, also called El Cid ‘the Spanish warrior hero’ who ‘had cleared the Moors out of Spain in the eleventh century’).

In the first minutes of El Cid we are told that our hero is a man who ‘rose above religious hatreds and called upon all Spaniards, whether Christian or Moor, to face a common enemy’. How differently such a subject could be treated is shown by a film that was made a year or two

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