Blood and Sand is a 1941 American Technicolor film drama starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth and Nazimova.

Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, it was produced by 20th Century Fox and was based on the 1908 Spanish novel Blood and Sand (Sangre y arena) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

[2] The supporting cast features Anthony Quinn, Lynn Bari, Laird Cregar, J. Carrol Naish, John Carradine and George Reeves.

Even Carmen leaves him, while Doña Sol moves on to new up-and-coming matador Manolo de Palma, one of Juan's childhood friends.

Of all Mamolian’s films, it is the most painterly, the most pictorial.” —Film historian Marc Spergel in Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian (1993).

[9] After Carole Landis, Zanuck's original choice, refused to dye her hair red for the role, Rita Hayworth was cast.

[10] A Lux Radio Theatre version of the story, starring Power and his then-wife Annabella as Carmen, was broadcast on October 20, 1941.

[1] Variety praised the picture, adding: "Especially effective are the bullfight arena sequences...Power delivers a persuasive performance as Ibanez's hero while Darnell is pretty and naive as the young wife.

But most of the essential cruelty of the theme is lost in pretty colors and rhetorical speeches...The better performances come in the lesser roles—Laird Cregar as an effeminate aficionado, J. Carrol Naish as a broken matador, John Carradine as a grumbling member of the quadrilla.

Slow-paced romance uplifted by Nazimova's knowing performance as Power's mother; beautiful color production earned cinematographers Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan Oscars.

[17] Malmoulian, an amateur painter, reported in a June 1941 interview with American Cinematographer that his sequences in Blood and Sand had been explicitly styled after the Spanish masters, among them Murillo, Goya, Velazquez, and El Greco.