The Three Musketeers series

  • The Three Musketeers (1948)

    The Three Musketeers (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) There have been a lot of adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers over the years, so the only way to talk about them is to highlight how they differ from one another. In the case of 1948’s version, the answer is simpler than we think: Gene Kelly. That’s it: Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, meeting the three musketeers and fighting valiantly against Milady, Countess de Winter (Lana Turner!) for the honour of France. The casting highlights doesn’t stop there, what with Vincent Price as Richelieu and Angela Lansbury as Queen Anne. The swashbuckling is strong in this late-1940s MGM spectacle, and while director George Sidney said he drew inspiration from westerns in staging the sword-fighting cinematography, the presence of Kelly suggests that there’s quite a bit of dancing inspiration in there as well—and Kelly’s skills were uniquely well suited for a non-singing sword-fighting hero. The colour cinematography still pops out today, and the rest of the adventure is handled competently, although perhaps too sedately when not busy with action scenes. Remove the cast and the sword-fighting and the film becomes far more ordinary, but that’s the nature of all versions of The Three Musketeers: we’re there for the swords, the rest is just fancy wrapping. If you want the story, read the book.

  • The Three Musketeers (1921)

    The Three Musketeers (1921)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.