The Pride and the Passion sounds like the novel Jane Austen forgot to write, but is in fact a Hollywood epic that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in French-occupied Spain.
The plot of the film is that a group of authentic Spanish ‘guerrillas’ are planning to move a big cannon across Spain in order to help the British defeat the French.
(‘Guerrilla’ is a word that came into English from the Spain of that epoch, although ‘guerrilla’ in fact means ‘little war’, whereas the English word ‘guerrilla’ is ‘guerrillero’ in Spanish).
The surly Spanish leader is that famous Spaniard Frank Sinatra, whereas the suave, typical Englishman is Cary Grant (well, at least he was born in England), and, to give even more authenticity, the Spanish peasant girl is Italian Sophia Loren.
In the film, the idea is to use the cannon to attack the French garrison at Ávila, Spain’s best-preserved walled city, founded in the XI century to protect the Spanish territories from the Moors.
One scene was shot at the impressive castle, which is now the Oropesa Parador in Toledo province, and which revolutionised (in the non-uprising-against-the-French sense of the word) the town, where practically nobody wasn’t an extra for the film. It was in the Parador that Sinatra asked the spectators at a bullfight to man up and help them pull the cannon from the river.
Responding to Sinatra’s rhetoric, the spectators turned on the French soldiers with their large knives and followed Sinatra out to rescue the cannon and their own self respect.
Of the stars, only Sinatra was involved in these scenes, and his presence at the Parador, which had functioned as a hotel since 1930, is remembered even today with a photographic exhibition.
