Word: cid
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...Cid (Samuel Bronston; Allied Artists). Don Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, Spain's greatest military genius, was born circa 1043 of noble yet obscure descent. Nevertheless, so extraordinary were Don Rodrigo's courage and character that at 28 he became commander in chief of the armies of Castile. Not for long. The able but treacherous King Alfonso VI, jealous of his vassal's victories and virtues, banished him. Undaunted, Don Rodrigo gathered an army of admirers, and off and on for 30 years beat back the Moslem armies. Though generally far outnumbered, he never lost a battle...
...Cid (as he is known in Spanish transliteration) was a great soul as well as a great soldier. "This man," wrote a Moslem chronicler, "was by his clear-eyed force, his strength of spirit and heroism, a miracle of the Almighty...
Fearless and teal, pious and pitying, cunning and courteous, he was a paragon of chivalry and the mold of Spanish manhood. He became a legend in his lifetime, and some 40 years after his death in 1099 he was celebrated in El Poema de Mio Cid-a vast rambling rime that became the national epic-as the Lancelot of Spain and something more, as a sort of Round Table...
Director Huston is in fact at the top of his form as an entertainer in the grandstand manner. Unfortunately, he has tried to be more than an entertainer. The Unforgiven is designed and executed as a heroic poem, a sort of cow-country Cid. Its pace is slow and noble. Its frames are often stark tableaux. Its characters are simplified and enlarged into figures for a legend. But the legend, like most synthetic folklore, fails to come alive. How could it when the sod hut looks like a page from HOUSE & HOME, when the back-country heroine has an elocution...
Lorenzaccio (by Alfred de Musset) launched a three-week visit of France's Theatre National Populaire-a people's theater which under the adventurous leadership of Jean Vilar has become popular indeed. Though French dramas of greater fame-Moliere's Don Juan, Corneille's Le Cid-were to follow it on Broadway. Musset's 124-year-old romantic tragedy made a booming opening gun. For one thing, despite its many-pronged story and far too many scenes, Lorenzaccio has considerable operatic stir, psychological lure and ironic force; for another, in the economical way that this...