The manager handed me over to the foreman, Bert Hanley, who, like everyone in the assembly building, was rust red from top to bottom from the all-pervading dust, and had to shout every word he spoke.
“Just one thing to remember, in here. Look up! Know where those gantries are all the time and what they’re doing. Wherever you go, whatever you do, keep one eye on the gantries.”
I looked up at the gantry and tripped over a pile of girders on the floor.
“You’ll get used to it,” the foreman assured me.

Samuel Bronson turned loose his next massive epic, based on the life of the great Spanish warrior hero El Cid. Way too long and generally boring and we had all tired of Charlton Heston doing his larger-than-life thing (although not one bit of looking at Sophia Loren) but the good bits redeemed it. These amounted to the eleven minute sword duel between Heston and Christopher Rhodes (or at least their stand-ins), the remarkable castle on the beach where the final battle was fought, and that breathtaking last scene. Which, if you haven’t seen it in widescreen, you haven’t seen it.
    The history (and the movie plot once it finally got around to it) has it that El Cid led his troops to victory over the Moors when he was actually dead. It makes you wonder how many more battles in history would have benefitted from all the generals being dead. Whatever, the Cid was mortally wounded and died overnight, whereby his devoted wife secretly put him in a wooden frame, sat him on his horse in his armour and full-face helmet, and gave it a slap on the rump. The horse charged the Moors fearlessly, the Spanish army followed and since their leader wasn’t alive to tell them when to retreat, they went straight over the top of their enemies. And so that final scene, and a broad beach stretching around a curved bay into the far distance, and dead El Cid comes galloping past the camera and heads off, away from us, all the way around the beach, into history. Best last shot of any movie ever for mine.