Word: cordobes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rumors of romance have been trailing Gina Lollobrigida for months. Suggested suitors have ranged from Matador El Cordobés to Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard. But this one is for real, says the Italian beauty. The fortunate fellow is George S. Kaufman, a wealthy Manhattan real estate executive who met Gina in New York two months ago. No kin to the late playwright, he likes to toss off lines like "My first and greatest present to Gina is my love." In Rome, where they announced plans to marry, the pair was mobbed by the press. Photographers followed them everywhere-even...
...Last week the annual Fair of San Isidro was at its peak. Yet two of Spam's best matadors were not even there, although that 16-day burst of bullfighting is the World Series, Davis Cup competition and The Ashes of cricket all folded into one. El Cordobés and Palomo Linares had defied Los Siete Grandes, the seven biggest ring owner-agents, who henceforth intend to control the sport by setting fees and scheduling matadors. For that, the pair had been banished, cast out to fight before the drunks and girls and the never-grow...
...practically already seen the movie. The familiar saga about the slum kid who fights his way to fame and wealth in the prize ring is here re-enacted in real-life Spain, where the classic path out of poverty into glory is the bull ring. The hero is El Cordobés (real name: Manuel Benítez), at 32 the most celebrated bullfighter in the world, if not always the most admired (TIME, June...
...frame through which El Cordobés' life is seen is his Big Fight - the 1964 Madrid corrida in which he was elevated to the status of matador de toros and in which he survived a near-fatal goring. Every tense moment in this corrida is the cue for a flashback: the future El Cordobés growing up in an earth-floored hovel where he sometimes has only grass to eat; serving a grueling apprenticeship at village fiestas where the only available medical care is a slosh of alcohol in an open wound; rising under the tutelage...
Authors Collins and Lapierre, whose first collaboration was the bestselling Is Paris Burning?, make prime melodrama out of El Cordobés' story, and they are frequently informative about the brutal, corrupt realities beneath bullfighting's cloak of romanticism. But the problem with their cinematic technique is that while it requires only a grainy black-and-white script, they give it a glossy, Technicolor treatment. Every irony is underlined, every climax hammered home, every scene overstuffed with authentic touches from their well-stocked notebooks. The result, paradoxically, is that their finished product is rarely as vivid and compelling...