"In Anthony Mann's best ('50s westerns) there is a tension between the meticulous clarity of the setting and the confusions affecting troubled heroes who were some years ahead of their placid time. (Mann) went to Spain to make his purest celebration of heroic virtue and maybe the best epic ever made. El Cid is a chronicle of 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, that allowed him to believe in a hero for whom trial-by-combat was the unequivocal vindication of honor. (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