The Three Musketeers (1921)

(On Cable TV, September 2019) The nice thing about Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is that it’s a well-known novel with a lot of material in it, and plenty of opportunities to shape it to become the film you want it to be. Whether you want swashbuckling, imposing acting performances, action sequences or historical recreations, it’s an evergreen classic. This early silent-cinema version of The Three Musketeers featuring Douglas Fairbanks hews more or less closely to the text (with many simplifications, some of them similar to what later films would do), but doesn’t feature nearly as many swordfights than you’d expect. Which may be for the better, as the art of combat cinematography hadn’t been perfected at that point—what fights are included do look wild and chaotic, swords flying everywhere in a way that makes no sense either in sword-fighting or movie spectacle. (But then there are reports that the actors disregarded their fencing choreography and simply went wild.)  In any case, this version of The Three Musketeers may disappoint from a contemporary point of view: while not terribly long by silent film standards, there’s a lot of plot and characters in here that will tax even patient viewers. I much prefer Fairbanks’ own The Mask of Zorro from a year earlier, but The Three Musketeers was the actor’s passion project—he even kept the character’s mustache for the rest of his life. It’s a fair piece of history that anticipates action filmmaking, but it’s not exactly wall-to-wall fun viewing.