01  Autumn 2025

Los Cien Caballeros (The Hundred Horsemen) was shot in Spain by Vittorio Cottafavi during July and August 1964. It is a Spanish-Italian-German co-production in Techniscope and the first film Cottafavi has shot for three years since his remarkable Ercole Alla Conquista di Atlantide.

The background to Los Cien Caballeros is at the same time very simple and very complicated. You must imagine a Spanish village far back in the past, let’s say about the year one thousand. The peasants are working the land and trying to trick their overlords who, in their turn, are occupied with exploiting the peasants; each side is trying to gain the maximum profit at the other’s expense. One day the Arabs arrive. They are organised, disciplined, logical people, and they oppose the disorganisation of the Lords and the peasants with intelligence, order, and hard work. These two completely different conceptions of life cannot help but clash, above all because the intellectual superiority of the Arabs stimulates their desire to dominate their weaker neighbours. Two other human groups observe this duel from a distance: the Bandits whose sole problem is survival and who steal democratically from Christians and Arabs alike, and the Monks, who are seeking truth by means of sacrifice and prayer. The tension between the two great opposing forces results in a fight to the death into which everyone is dragged whether they want to be or not. Paying the price of suffering or death, the protagonists (and spectators) will find what is true for them, and will learn how to live on, united, in a new society.

It is easy to understand the risks inherent in filming such a subject. The breadth of the themes and the multiplicity of episodes called for stylisation in order to balance the overall story with the individual details. And the trap of pretension had to be avoided too! The necessary stylisation had to come from the mise en scène with each shot going straight to the essential. Having seen thirty-five reels of rushes (80% of the total footage), I believe that Cottafavi has completely, or almost, succeeded in his little tour de force.

The interesting thing about Los Cien Caballeros is that its meaning is enclosed in the visual conception of the film in its images and movement: in its mise en scène. The first appearance of the Arabs illustrates this. Despite the efforts of the Alcalde (the Mayor) at conciliation, there is a violent quarrel between the peasants and the Lords over the price of corn; at the end of this the camera rises to give a general view of the meeting (thus suddenly suggesting the banality of the arguments) and the smooth camera movements are broken by a very rapid forward tracking shot on to an Arab bowing, smiling, almost stupidly, announcing the arrival of the Sheik. In ironic contrast, a regiment of Arabs makes an impressive entry into the village square, deploying three by three in columns of horsemen. A slow but exciting panning shot shows them arriving in front of the Town Hall looking solemn but also cunning and threatening. The costumes of the Christians (Peasants, Lords, Bandits, Monks) are in red, green and yellow. The Arabs are dressed in a brilliant blue which clashes violently with the other colours. The spectator is led to feel, if only unconsciously, that the arrival of the Arabs is a real intrusion.

In Los Cien Caballeros, as in the other films of Cottafavi, complex ideas are often expressed in images which, by their visual force, attain a moral significance. I am thinking, for example, of the Sheik rearing up on his horse before the last battle, mocking his prisoners, and braving destiny. There is something in his movements which suggests Satan: as if by chance, this is the moment at which his pride, raised to its highest pitch, makes him a satanic figure. Devil or not, he has all the assurance of Evil, that malignant elegance to be found in the James Mason character in North by North-West. The beauty of Cottafavi’s shots (and he uses scope with a marvellous sense of composition) does not owe much to improvisation but to the logic and intelligence with which the facts are presented to us. This way of arranging his shots is often reminiscent of Lang and Preminger. Like them, Cottafavi has a style which reaches towards distillation and purification.

All this reminds me of an accurate remark by Charles Barr concerning Ercole Alla Conquista di Atlantide in Movie 3: ‘At certain moments Cottafavi succeeds in expressing states of mind, emotions, conflicts, with an extraordinary purity, in crystallised form as it were.’ ^[1] It is precisely the ‘crystallised’ quality of certain shots that struck me when viewing the rushes. I think that obtaining this pure state is one of the major preoccupations of Cottafavi, who likes to film his characters above all at moments of profound crisis. Such a moment comes for Halaf, the sensitive and intelligent son of the Sheik, in the carpenter’s shop in the monastery, when he discovers an image of Christ on the cross and tries to understand a sacrifice the significance of which escapes him. Halaf’s emotion is literally apparent in the picture. (After a difficult start to shooting, this sequence was the first in which I saw Cottafavi relaxed and sure of himself.) And for the Alcalde, the critical moment arrives when he leaves the square after the execution of the peasant Manuel. He becomes conscious of his cowardice and lack of concern for his own people. After the peasants’ revolt, he gives himself up to the Sheik, taking all the blame on himself and becoming the image of dignity and courage. Cottafavi must have felt that these shots were in a way privileged and, when he was shooting them, he directed his actors with extraordinary patience and attention to detail, taking particular care over the looks they exchanged.

The climax of these moments of crisis is death, of course. I think that Los Cien Caballeros contains some of the most beautiful deaths ever seen in the cinema: the deaths of Manuel, the Alcalde, the very moving ones of Don Gonzalo and the Sheik. I must limit myself to discussion of the latter. When Cottafavi is using a good actor, there is no nonsense, and since the actor who played the Sheik was good (Wolfgang Preiss, who played the three parts of Cornelius-Jordan-Mabuse in The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse), Cottafavi explained to him what he wanted without mincing his words. During the battle, the Sheik is mortally wounded by the dwarf, a very Cottafavian play of contrasts: the strongest is destroyed by the weakest. The Sheik pulls the sword out of his back and discovers slowly and painfully that even for him, the all-powerful, the hour of death has come. He holds the sword in front of him like a cross, symbol of the force he has dared to oppose, looks at the blinding sun, staggers forward a few paces and drops down dead. And that is what Preiss did... except that when he fell the edge of his Arab cloak accidentally hid his face because of his falling movement and the slight breeze. This was a very beautiful but unforeseen idea: the disappearance of the Sheik’s face gave an even greater sensation of death, and it was his own cloak – the symbol of his power had now become his shroud! For me, the moral of this incident is very simple: chance is always on the side of the real film maker.

You must not think from all this that the film is a purely tragic one. Los Cien Caballeros is also very funny. When I met Cottafavi for the first time two years ago, he pointed out that in Il Boia di Lilla (The Hangman of Lille, 1952) he had already tried to unite ethics and humour. I think that this important intellectual operation reaches extraordinary heights in Los Cien Caballeros. The relationship between the characters and their ideas is observed with great irony. When the young Fernando and his father Don Gonzalo (who wears the same headgear as Don Quixote) arrive at the castle of the Count of Castilla to seek help in order to relieve the village occupied by the Arabs, a little army of cripples is mounting guard in the courtyard. They constitute a living war museum, a reminder of past battles and glories. But when it is known that there is a war, the cripples are hidden as soon as possible in order not to discourage the youngsters. In this way, as is often the case in Shakespeare, humour originates at the very centre of tragedy. When Sancha is captured by the Arabs along with the other women of her village, she becomes mad with grief at losing her lover Fernando. ‘There are no men’, she says, so she gets undressed to mortify her cowardly fiancé Jaime. At the depth of her despair she forgets her natural modesty. But at the same time the scene is funny because it is like a modern strip-tease!

Cottafavi, like Lang, has, besides his love of logic and order, a marked taste for something more delirious. The metronomic movements of the Arabs turn sometimes into real burlesque ballets, and everything concerning the Bandits is pure burlesque. They are big and frightening but governed by a simple dwarf of whom they are absolutely terrified. They sing a refrain in the style of Villon: ‘And when my body from the rope shall sway / ...then my neck will know how much my arse doth weigh.’ This mixture of comedy and tragedy will make Los Cien Caballeros very close, I suppose, to Elizabethan theatre.

There are also constant references to contemporary problems: the Count of Castilla’s military engineer invents a suit of armour which covers the soldier’s entire body and makes him invincible; the Sheik gives a lecture on productivity. These references however are not there gratuitously or with satirical intent, but, as in Ercole Alla Conquista di Atlantide, they form humorous parallels deliberately intended to express a clear moral judgment about man and the world; the spectator is never brought from the past into the present without good reason. For example, at the very beginning of the film, a crippled painter, who is working on an enormous mural, turns towards the audience and begins to talk about the characters represented in his painting. We realise that the painting is an altar-piece in which there is no central figure, and in which any character can become and effectively becomes the centre of the story. The painter’s words, although evoking a long-past age, also reveal the perspective opened up by looking at things from the point of view of a man of today, so that he will understand the moral of the fable. With the help of this ‘distanciation’, one can easily follow the structure and argument of the film: it’s about peace, war and life, showing possible attitudes that can be adopted towards them. Perhaps this sounds as if it is a ‘film with a message’, but, as Cottafavi said: ‘We must not make political or ethical speeches, we must be political and ethical, then people will understand us more directly than through words.’ Well, the chips are down, now it’s up to the public…

In Movie, 12, Spring 1965, pp. 18-20.