I was just a kid the first time that I saw Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973). My mother was a really big fan of Lester’s two Musketeers films. She showed me these films with great anticipation that I, like her, would love these movies. As a fan of The Crimson Pirate (1952) I should have enjoyed Lester’s Musketeers films but something about them left me cold.
I think my major issue with The Three Musketeers and its sequel (they were shot simultaneously) is that Lester attempted to combine swashbuckling heroics with slapstick. As a concept that could work but Lester’s blocking and the way he photographs sword fights and rough and tumble dueling falls flat. The slapstick portions of the film have an energy that the swashbuckling scenes lack. Which, in the end, shouldn’t be surprising since Lester’s Superman III (1983) sacrificed so much in the name of comedy.
In the first of these films, The Three Musketeers, the focus is so much on Michael York’s d’Artagnan that the large ensemble cast is underused. Actors like Christopher Lee and Oliver Reed still steal all their scenes even though their scenes are too short and too scarce. An actor like Faye Dunaway, with her larger than life screen presence, doesn’t really get time to shine until the second film while the equally dynamic Raquel Welch exists primarily as little more than a sex object.
The issue with shooting these films simultaneously is that each on its own feels like an episode in a larger series. The Three Musketeers is not self contained enough to function as a film in its own right. Instead Lester leaves the viewer baffled and frustrated that the cast and their characters function as gimmicks or contrived novelty casting for the sake of prestige.
The real stars of The Three Musketeers are Michael York (of course) and his sidekick Roy Kinnear. Kinnear had worked with Lester before on Help! (1965) and remained one of Lester’s favorite character actors. Kinnear, like York, specialized more in slapstick antics rather than swashbuckling heroics. Together these actors epitomize Lester’s approach to the material which, arguably, could be seen as a sloppy subversion of the swashbuckling genre with broad comedy.
It also doesn’t help that the pacing of The Three Musketeers is all over the place, moving in random spurts. The cinematographic kineticism that should carry both a swashbuckling adventure yarn and a slapstick comedy is dreadfully inconsistent. The resulting movie playing out at too languid a pace to hold the viewer’s attention.
