October 2006

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers

• Starring: Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Christopher Lee, Geraldine Chaplin, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Sybil Danning
• Directed by: Richard Lester
• Theatrical releases: 1973/1974
• DVD release: 2003
• Video: Widescreen
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
• Released by: Anchor Bay

If you look at most of my films very analytically, there is practically no camera movement, practically no zooms, practically no camera work at all. If you look at The Three Musketeers, I think the camera moves three times in the whole film, yet they say, "Ah, yes. It’s that Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film style of camerawork." It isn’t true. But there is something, I suppose, in the way that I frame shots, or put them together, that makes people think it is true.
-- Richard Lester, in the book The Man Who Framed The Beatles

The first time Richard Lester’s name appeared (as Dick Lester) with the word director attached to it was in 1959, for an 11-minute short titled The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. Codirected by Peter Sellers, it featured a frenetic pace and silly humor that later inspired Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Academy loved it, and nominated it for an Oscar. John Lennon and Paul McCartney loved it too, and requested that Lester direct first the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), then Help! (1965). Along the way, Lester invented the concept of multi-camera concert filming (imagine MTV without that), and helped cement the model of Swinging London so artfully mimicked by Jay Roach in his Austin Powers films.

But by 1973, Lester had lost his mojo. After suffering three box-office losers (How I Won the War, Petulia, and The Bed Sitting Room) between 1967 and 1969, he was spending most of his time directing Italian TV commercials.

Ilya Salkind and his father, Alexander, were film producers based in Spain who had a penchant for hiring good actors to make movies for drive-in theaters, such as Bluebeard (with Richard Burton) and Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (with James Mason). Even that somewhat déclassé portfolio did not discourage Lester from abandoning TV ads to join the Salkinds when they approached him about making The Three Musketeers.

In Spain, the Salkinds had access to cut-rate locations, costumes, and crews, so they decided to spend lavishly on the cast. Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Faye Dunaway, and Charlton Heston were all major stars, while Frank Finlay, Spike Milligan, and Roy Kinnear were well-known comedians.

Lester proceeded to fill The Three Musketeers with some of the most realistic swashbuckling ever committed to film, along with a generous soupçon of slapstick mayhem, a wallow in Italianate neorealism, enough (literal) cloak-and-dagger work to grab and keep the audience’s attention -- and somehow packaged it all into a genuinely warmhearted and majestic film. There were only two problems: The film’s rough cut ran almost four hours, and all of it was good.

Of course, a film only four hours long pales in comparison to the author’s conception. Alexandre Dumas’s original meditations on musketeering, the D’Artagnan Romances, run to a total of 3800 pages, of which The Three Musketeers is only the first part. The French journal Le Siècle originally published the Romances in serial form; French readers devoured Dumas’s combo plate of romance, adventure, and social satire, all wrapped up in a gripping good tale. Even with four hours at his disposal, Lester could touch only the surface of the series’ first 700 pages. But he had a few good tricks up his sleeve.

First and foremost was the huge cast. Michael York made the young bumpkin, D’Artagnan, into an amalgam of courage, loyalty, hilariously inappropriate manners, and sexual arousal. The target of his excitement was the luscious Constance de Bonancieux, played by Raquel Welch, who surprised everyone by demonstrating a knack for physical comedy. The three musketeers were delightful choices. Oliver Reed’s Athos is a brooding masterpiece of physical acting, Richard Chamberlain fashions Aramis as a smirking dandy in heat, and Frank Finlay as Porthos, while earning the biggest laughs, is a good enough actor that his fatherly concern for D’Artagnan has genuine pathos.

The supporting crew is similarly superb. Geraldine Chaplin as Anna of Austria has never been sexier or more beautiful, lending credence to the story’s claim that men would go to war over her. Faye Dunaway’s Milady de Winter is treacherous seduction personified, and Charlton Heston is the meanest Cardinal Richelieu the screen has seen (note his relish as he tours the torture chambers). As D’Artagnan’s servant, Planchet, Roy Kinnear brings hilarious comic relief throughout the film.

As befits a work that began life as a serial, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers work as progressions of set pieces, most of them built around fights. Lester’s genius is in his transitions and his powerful sense of the visually absurd. Every scene is crowded with people; if you watch carefully, you’ll see things going on in the backgrounds that are as funny as the tribulations of the stars.

Everything about the production is extravagant and lush. The awe-inspiring costumes reveal a historian’s eye for early-17th-century detail. The settings, mostly in Spanish castles, are perfect for the period of the reign of Louis XIII. In fact, production designer Brian Eatwell and costume designer Yvonne Blake were robbed at the Oscars when The Sting took home both awards. For what?

The final piece of extravagance was the score by composer Michel Legrand, who blends music in the style of the 17th century with his own take on adventure music. Scenes that might have bored spring to life with Legrand’s music. Watch chapter 24 of the first disc and imagine the scene without the music. Legrand elevates the film by adding a dimension of nobility to all the physical comedy and adventure.

When one or two actors in a show turn in good performances, thank them. When everyone is great, thank the director. Richard Lester creates a world we want to live in; we want to be, by turns, the musketeers, the lovers, and the conspirators. He accomplishes all this in the manner of the best directors -- such as John Ford and Howard Hawks and Akira Kurosawa -- by flawlessly melding action, humor, and tender depictions of positive human traits, and by knowing exactly when to use each. His direction of story, character, mood, and music are virtuosic.

Back to that four-hour running time. At some point, someone -- both Lester and Ilya Salkind have been mentioned as the culprits -- decided to cut one long film into two. Except that they forgot to mention it to the actors. Suddenly, people used to being paid by the film found out that they had made two for the price of one. When an agreement was finally reached, it ended up setting in motion a ruling -- still called the Salkind Clause -- by the Screen Actors Guild: from thenceforth, any contract between an actor and a producer would be, by default, for one film only.

The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) each made a huge amount of money for all concerned. The Salkinds became major Hollywood players, and Lester went on to direct Superman II (1980) and Superman III (1983) for them (he’d been an uncredited producer for Superman in 1978). Then, after directing Finders Keepers (1984), he dropped out of sight for five years, until he decided to get the whole crew back together for The Return of the Musketeers (1989). Sadly, his friend Roy Kinnear (Planchet) died during filming when he fell off a horse. Kinnear’s death left Lester disconsolate. The filmmaking became a burden instead of a joy; The Return has only glimpses of the magic of the first two Musketeers films. Since then Lester has directed only one other film, Get Back (1991), of a Paul McCartney concert.

The Musketeers legacy on DVD was insulted by Fox Lorber, who offered two of the worst DVD mastering jobs ever foisted on the American public. Whole sections of the image went missing; the mastering crew frequently cropped the tops or bottoms or sides -- or all three -- and the prints looked blurry, dirty, and muffled. Shame on Fox Lorber.

Still, lovers of the Musketeers movies could fantasize that they were watching a pristine copy -- at least during those rare moments when they weren’t gripped by the fantastic swordplay (never bettered for reality) or rolling out of their chairs from laughter.

Thankfully, the folks at Anchor Bay recognized that these classics deserved star treatment. Their two-DVD set provides glorious colors, a perfectly clean print, and restores the brilliant sound of Legrand’s score. Also, they wisely included both films in a single package at a cheaper price. Fox Lorber had charged a total of $60 for the two separate discs; Anchor Bay’s list price for the set is $40 (and the street price is about $32).

Try to watch the two films as a single narrative, with the ending of The Three Musketeers your cue for an intermission. Take a break, get a nice bottle of Bordeaux, and settle in for the ending.

I still dream that Lester might gather the surviving cast members to finish what Dumas started. Dumas’s The Three Musketeers was the basis for Lester’s first two Musketeers films, and Lester based The Return of the Musketeers on Dumas’s second volume, Twenty Years Later. The final Musketeers book, The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, is over 2000 pages long.

Perhaps Lester will take pity on those of us who’d like to see that long tale reach its final climax onscreen. That would be a real treat.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

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