“Anthony Mann was the most consistent and successful maker of Westerns in the 1950s, combining a rapture over pristine landscapes with a line of troubled heroes some years ahead of their time. In all of his best films there is a tension between the meticulous clarity of the setting and the confusions affecting the hero. Invariably, the man was James Stewart, but in 1958, in his penultimate Western, a barely steady but unflinching Gary Cooper was Man of the West. The hero was coming apart before our eyes, dying of age and infirmity, his reformed character and his outlaw past acting on him like a deteriorating disease.
“After Cimarron (1960), Mann never had another chance at a Western. Instead, he went to Spain with Samuel Bronston to make his purest celebration of heroic virtue and maybe the best epic ever filmed. El Cid is a chronicle of a national unification against a racial enemy: Spain throwing out the Moors. But if Spanish history was more remote from Mann than America's frontier experience, this let him believe in a hero for whom trial by combat was the unequivocal vindication of honor. That sounds simplistic, but the film stays alive and moving because no one has ever surpassed Mann in the lucid visual depiction of action. In moving to swords and armor from six-guns and buckskins, he only demonstrated that the old Western had always been the description of a struggle and an innocent song of victory. The Cid may be the last unworried hero, dead but glowing, riding into folklore like a statue in motion.” David Thomson