The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers: En Garde for Joy!

The Three Musketeers, filmed in Spain over seventeen weeks, was originally intended to be a three-hour movie. But because it couldn’t be finished at that length in time to hit the already-announced release date, producer Alexander Salkind—one of the great wheeler-dealers of his era, with a knack for putting together highly successful productions outside the Hollywood system—decided to split it into two films, without letting most of the actors or crew know. Their contracts asserted that they were being paid for just one film. “Everybody was furious,” said Chamberlain, quoted in Barbara Siegel and Scott Siegel’s Richard Chamberlain: An Actor’s Life. (He had worked with Lester before, on Petulia.) Several lawsuits were filed against Salkind, the resolution of which led the Screen Actors Guild to add the “Salkind clause” to all contracts: the number of finished films an actor is agreeing to appear in must be clearly stipulated.

In Richard Lester!, Stacy Cochran’s delightful 1998 short film about the director and his work, Lester says that he would have liked the two movies to be reassembled as one at some point. “In my mind,” he says, “that’s the way they should have been. Because they started out very light and went more and more into melodrama. And you can see the line quite clearly when you put the two films together.”

He’s right. The Three Musketeers’ jauntiness begins with its opening-credit sequence, in which d’Artagnan (York), at this point just a country boy, practices his sword work with his father (Joss Ackland). The swordplay in both films was choreographed by William Hobbs, who had honed his skills in Shakespeare productions for the National Theatre at the Old Vic. He became the go-to guy for stage combat in movies—Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists, John Boorman’s Excalibur. (His final credit was for Game of Thrones in 2011; he died in 2018.) This fight—playful, graceful, nonaggressive—is shot using an elegant, shuddering visual effect; we can both hear and see the blue coldness of the steel. Also of note: even before the movie has begun, we’re treated to the glorious, shimmering vision of a shirtless York.

Lester’s instincts about how the two films fit together are one good reason to watch them back-to-back. In The Four Musketeers, the stakes gradually become higher, even for a breezy swashbuckler, and there’s a death you don’t see coming. Lester brushes this second film with slightly more somber colors, but the gradations are so subtle that they never jar us. From the start, we’re invited to sink into the plushness of this story, and we do: In the earlier film, d’Artagnan falls for Constance at first sight, his eyes, the loveliest seawater blue, virtually turning into pinwheels of adoration. One night they woo, saucily. Constance has been dragged from her bed by Rochefort, and has only just narrowly escaped him and his goons; she hopes to get to the queen to warn her of impending danger, first running to d’Artagnan for help. He notices her legs are dirty; she can’t possibly go to the queen with dirty legs, can she? Unsurprisingly, Constance is persuaded to postpone her mission until the next morning. Their assignation is represented by a single candle perched on a table, which grows shorter as daybreak approaches. (The cinematographer here is David Watkin, who works magic with both the film’s interiors, lit with a creamy glow, and its many sequences of countryside life, dotted with geese and cows, rugged fences and rustic cottages.)

Welch is charming in both films; she plays Constance as a sweet, dizzy flower, fond of breathy declamations. In fact, everyone appears to be having a grand time: Dunaway’s duplicitous, dewily beautiful Milady is like a meringue with a dagger concealed inside. Heston, slithering about in his devil-priest goatee, knows just how much camp to inject into his performance. There’s lots of room for wonderful character actors, chief among them Roy Kinnear as d’Artagnan’s loyal servant Planchet: tubby and perpetually game, he gives himself over to the movies’ sunny slapstick—though his appearance comes with an attendant note of mournfulness. Kinnear, who was one of Lester’s close friends, would die while making The Return of the Musketeers, after tumbling from the back of a horse. Lester felt responsible for his friend’s death, and save for one documentary (Paul McCartney’s Get Back, from 1991), he never directed another film.

Perhaps that’s all the more reason to appreciate The Three Musketeers and its sequel as proper celebrations of the art of grand-scale moviemaking, in which a group of like-minded performers come together to complete a once- (or make that twice-) in-a-lifetime mission. It’s true that not all of the four musketeers have equal weight in the film. Chamberlain, while stunningly handsome—as well as skilled in riding and swordplay—doesn’t get enough screen time to fully register as a character. (“When I saw the movie, I couldn’t find myself,” he once said jovially, perhaps having taken the musketeers’ motto, “All for one and one for all,” to heart.) Finlay has some fine comic moments, mostly involving fussing over one piece of apparel or another; he makes an endearingly annoying Porthos. York gets the most screen time of all, and it’s easy to see why: his leonine features are both elegant and adorable. He’s the picture of innocence and eagerness, but there’s something regal about him too. He’s ready to be a hero—he just hasn’t yet figured out how.

But if these movies belong to one performer, it’s Oliver Reed. Reed—whose uncle was The Third Man director Carol Reed—was at the time famous for his compelling acting and infamous for his drinking. His breakthrough role was as the surly beast Bill Sikes in his uncle’s superb Dickens adaptation, Oliver! (1968). He worked frequently with Ken Russell, gracing us with the first full-frontal nude in British cinema in Women in Love (1969). His fondness for drink led to lots of brawls; one particularly brutal scramble left him with permanent facial scars. As Athos, he looks as if he could blow his top at any minute. The things we love in performances are not always the things we ought to love in real life—you wouldn’t want to be around that kind of simmering anger all the time.

But as Athos, Reed’s volatility makes him electric, and real. It also serves as a kind of cloud cover for his kindness: time and again, he sees young d’Artagnan floundering, either emotionally or physically, and steps in to help with graciousness unmarred by condescension. In one of his finest moments, Athos relays to d’Artagnan the story of a lost love, as we see it unfold in flashback. Here’s where Reed’s face betrays a sort of beatific softness. As Athos, he represents all the things stereotypically manly men so often try to hide: a desire to surrender to all that a woman can offer, whether that’s warmth or cruelty; a capacity for suffering that’s usually locked away in a box of pride; and, above all, a yearning for, and a belief in, true love. There’s grace deep inside Athos. Frequently, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are joyfully, intentionally over-the-top. Lester revels in jokey asides and gags involving heaving, in-your-face bosoms, and there are lots of scenes of inebriated partying. Yet there’s subtlety here, too, a yielding to everything that, even in a storybook swashbuckler, makes us human. It’s all there in Athos’s face, ever ready for a fight, or a drink. But it’s still a face that knows the meaning and value of tenderness, even if that’s a thing he tucked away for safety long ago.

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