The Three Musketeers

The movie Musketeers most faithful to Dumas’ spirit didn’t arrive until director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) delivered The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. Overflowing with Lester’s trademark irreverence and slapstick, these films still retain a vivid and bawdy period flavor.

Alexandre Dumas pere's 1844 novel has been filmed more than four dozen times, but this lavish and hilarious rendition is the pinnacle. [21 Sep 2007, p.38]

Few adventure movies have such a heightened atmosphere of beauty, excitement and fun. [18 Apr 1999, p.34C]

A superb bit of tongue-in-cheekery, stylish and fun but also deeply affectionate. [11 Aug 1985, p.5]

The Three Musketeers take very well to Richard Lester’s provocative version that does not send it up but does add comedy to this adventure tale [by Alexandre Dumas].

The cast is good (though it remains very much Lester's film), the fights appropriately energetic, and it all moves along at a fair pace, sprinkled with a number of good gags.

Mr. Lester's interpretation of The Three Musketeers looks like an evening in a bump-o-car arena, with magnificently costumed people in place of cars. The adventures are less swashbuckle than slapstick.

I confess that I expected something more serious from this film, but it also didn't surprise me what I found. Of all, the Seventies is, for me, the decade where films were the worst and most unpleasant. This includes comedies like this, loaded with overt sexual hints and forced humor, that has aged so badly that it has virtually forgotten. The script is well known and adapts for the cinema, again, the novel by Alexandre Dumas in which an aspiring Musketeer needs to wage a palatial conjuration around the French queen, Anne. The film tries to be funny, but it ****. By choosing for easy and slapstick humor, with constant sexual allusions and dialogues full of double meanings, the film was spoiled. The fight scenes are terrible: everyone fights as if they had never seen a sword, were drunk or wagered on dismantling half the scenery by falling on it. Some characters, such as Planchet or Bonacieux, are stripped of dignity and turned into clowns. The three musketeers, who were supposed to be experienced fighters, look like pompous puppets and even D'Artagnan himself looks more like a stupid teenager, who thinks with his manly member and not his head. I could also mention the fact that Constance was originally Bonacieux's daughter and not an ardent and adulterous wife married to an old man... but is it worth it? The best part of the film is, curiously, its luxurious cast, full of names that sounded at the time. The problem is that none of them received good material and are not able to show their talent! All characters lack development and sound worse than in a school play. Starting with the best, I can highlight Christopher Lee, who gave us a cold, dignified, chivalrous and elegant Rochefort; Faye Dunaway is just as restrained and threatening as Milady; Charlton Heston looks rather subdued but still satisfying in a Richelieu that sounds very old; Geraldine Chaplin does what she can but at times seems lost; Simon Ward and Georges Wilson also did well, but they don't have much to do and Oliver Reed is quite dignified when he's not doing comedy or pretending to be drunk. Having made these positive caveats, what remains are disastrous. Michael York is immature; Jean-Pierre Cassel is an idiot; Roy Kinnear and Spike Miligan tire the audience with so many boring jokes; Frank Finlay and Richard Chamberlain almost disappear from the film and Raquel Welch seems to have been cast for their role by the size of her breast and her ability to show them, in cleavage or through thinner fabric. Technically, the film tried - and succeeded - to bring to the screen the beauty of the first phase of Royal Absolutism. Filmed in Spain - curiously, the birthplace of Queen Anne, one of the main characters - it takes advantage of the magnificent filming locations, such as the Palace of Aranjuez and the Alcázar de Segovia. The costumes are good, detailed, seem historically credible and go against Dumas' imagination. Of course, there are absurd situations, such as dog chess or that kind of "white party" at the end (I thought that white parties were a thing of decadent nightclubs with too much black light). Cinematography corresponds to the state of the art at the time and is quite dated, but I handled it well. The edition is not one of the most subtle, with the cuts being, at times, quite evident. The soundtrack makes an effort to be epic, but I hated hearing it "chew" themes like the triumphant march of the opera Aida, by Giuseppe Verdi.