Word: cid
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Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha...
Heston didn't just play great roles, he imposingly, thrillingly embodied them. Moses (in The Ten Commandments), Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy), Rodrigo Diaz (El Cid), Judah Ben-Hur in the Godzilla of Biblical epics: he slipped into these outsize figures as if into a second skin, stamped his strong visage on theirs. He also, actually, did play God once - in the 1990 Paul Hogan comedy Almost an Angel - but he had revealed his movie divinity long before that...
...excitement of that nine-minute horse race, Ben-Hur was long and logy. But with Heston now the go-to hero, it guaranteed that he'd be cast in his finest role: el Cid. In this Anthony Mann film, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar is an 11th-century Spanish soldier who tempers force with wisdom, seeking a peace with the large local Islamic minority it is his job to subdue, and preaching moderation in the Court of King Ferdinand. Almost a pacifist warrior, he spends most of the film debating large issues with other beautiful people (Sophia Loren, John Fraser...
DEFINITION the de-cid-er n. The person possessing final...
...violence, their sense of the world as a rat trap with rancid cheese as the bait. The westerns Mann made with James Stewart - Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country - constitute the strongest body of work, for that time, in that uniquely American form. El Cid is, to my mind, among the very finest of epic films, second only, perhaps, to Lawrence of Arabia...