He submitted an original scenario for a melodrama called El Dorado, set in Andalusia, to his producer Léon Gaumont, and rather to his surprise it was immediately accepted.

L'Herbier was adamant that the film should carry the subtitle "mélodrame", both to indicate the popular origins of its story, but also to point to its more traditional sense of the combination of drama and music.

[3] In Granada in Spain, Sibilla works as a dancer in a squalid cabaret called El Dorado, struggling to earn enough to care for her sick child.

The boy's father Estiria, a prominent citizen, refuses them both help and recognition, fearful of jeopardising the engagement of his adult daughter Iliana to a wealthy nobleman.

For the first time ever, permission had been granted for a film company to shoot inside the Alhambra palace and L'Herbier gave prominent place to its gardens, fountains and geometric architectural patterns.

During the approach to Easter, he also seized the chance to film the spectacular Holy Week processions which took place in Seville and to incorporate this documentary footage within the fiction of his story.

When Sibilla is first introduced among the other dancers on stage, a partial blurring of the image places her out-of-focus while those around her are sharply defined, an effect repeated in her subsequent dance to suggest that she herself is not fully focussed on her surroundings because her mind is preoccupied with the plight of her son.

When the film was first shown to him, he angrily interrupted the screening to demand that the projectionist should correct his equipment, and he was scarcely mollified when it was explained that these were a deliberate part of the director's vision.

[14] When the film was released to the public in October 1921 it enjoyed a broad success, even though some spectators were sufficiently impatient with the visual effects to make occasionally vocal protests.

[16] Among those who subsequently felt the influence of El Dorado was Alain Resnais who "sought to renew a certain style of silent cinema" when he was making L'Année dernière à Marienbad.