The Three Musketeers (1973 film)

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The Three Musketeers is a 1973 film based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. Directed by Richard Lester and writen by George MacDonald Fraser (famous for his Flashman series of historical comic novels). The film was originally intended to run for three hours, but later the film was split in two (resulting in 1974's The Four Musketeers). In 1989, the cast and crew returned to film The Return of the Musketeers, loosely based on Dumas' Twenty Years After.

The film adheres strongly to the novel, but it also injects a fair amount of humour, and the film itself has garnered much critical praise. The two films together are generally considered to be the best filmed version of the famous adventure story [1]. It is certainly Lester's best film work apart from A Hard Day's Night. Fraser's Flashman novels manage the difficult trick of saluting heroism even as they satirize it, and that spirit infuses the movies, which have the debunking spirit of the cynical Seventies but are still exhilirating to watch. (It helps that both films are gorgeously shot by David Watkins, with a keen eye for period detail.) The spectacular fight scenes (choreographed by master swordsman William Hobbs) turn the swashbuckling movies of the Forties and Fifties on their collective ear; these are more like brawls, with the combatants using knees, fists, furniture and even wet laundry as often as they do their swords.

The casting could hardly be bettered, and the actors play off each other with obvious relish: Oliver Reed as the brooding Athos, Frank Finlay as the preening Porthos, Richard Chamberlain as the elegant womanizer Aramis, and an impossibly trim Michael York as the lethal bumpkin D'Artagnan. Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway are wonderful as the chiuef villains.

If there is any complaint to be made, it is that the shift to a darker tone in [The Four Musketeers]] could have been handled more smoothly, and the ending is quite abrupt.