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 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. This sounds simplistic, but the film stays alive and moving because no one has ever surpassed Mann in the lucid visual depiction of action....The Cid may be the last unworried hero-dead but glowing, riding into folklore like a statue in motion.