The Three Musketeers (1973 film)

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The Three Musketeers
1974 movie poster
Directed by	Richard Lester
Produced by	Alexander Salkind Ilya Salkind Pierre Spengler
Written by	George MacDonald Fraser based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, père
Starring	Oliver Reed Charlton Heston Raquel Welch Faye Dunaway Richard Chamberlain Frank Finlay Michael York Christopher Lee
Music by	Michel Legrand
Cinematography	David Watkin
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	December 11, 1973 March 29, 1974
Running time	105 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
Followed by	The Four Musketeers
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The Three Musketeers is a 1973 film based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. Directed by Richard Lester and written by George MacDonald Fraser (famous for his Flashman series of historical comic novels). The film was originally intended to run for three hours, but later the film was split in two (resulting in 1974's The Four Musketeers). The actors themselves were not informed that they were working on two films simultaneously, only Charlton Heston — handsomely paid for his handful of scenes — did not feel cheated by this duplicity. In 1989, the cast and crew returned to film The Return of the Musketeers, loosely based on Dumas' Twenty Years After.

The film adheres strongly to the novel, but it also injects a fair amount of humour, and the film itself has garnered much critical praise. Fraser's Flashman novels manage the difficult trick of saluting heroism even as they satirize it, and that spirit infuses the movies, which have the debunking spirit of the cynical Seventies but are still exhilirating to watch. (It helps that both films are gorgeously shot by David Watkins, with a keen eye for period detail.) The spectacular fight scenes (choreographed by master swordsman William Hobbs) turn the swashbuckling movies of the Forties and Fifties on their collective ear; these are more like brawls, with the combatants using knees, fists, furniture and even wet laundry as often as they do their swords.

The cast includes: Oliver Reed as the brooding Athos, Frank Finlay as the preening Porthos, Richard Chamberlain as the elegant womanizer Aramis, and an impossibly trim Michael York as the lethal bumpkin D'Artagnan. Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston and Faye Dunaway are wonderful as the chief villains.