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The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers

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Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color


Description:

Alexandre Dumas's adventure has been adapted to film more than a half-dozen times, but never with more swashbuckling energy and humor than in this version of The Three Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester (with a screenplay by George McDonald Fraser). Lester infuses the tale of bumpkin D'Artagnan's efforts to join the musketeers with a solid sense of the period, but also finds great slapstick wit in the action. The swordplay is wonderfully unpredictable precisely because his characters are human and prone to miscues and misjudgment. He also has assembled an amazingly varied cast--including Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, and British comic Spike Milligan--for the tale of how D'Artagnan befriends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis and, in the process, saves the honor of the queen from a plot by Cardinal Richelieu. It gets even better in the sequel, The Four Musketeers. The footage for both movies was actually shot concurrently, then divided into two films, much to the cast's chagrin (they'd only been paid to make one movie). The sequel is a solid continuation of the original, with the same strong cast and the same heady brew of romance, swashbuckling action, cunning plotting, and slapstick inventiveness. The musketeers still battle the forces of evil in the form of Cardinal Richelieu (a well-cast Heston), even as the past comes back to haunt Athos (Reed) in the form of Lady de Winter (Dunaway). Slightly darker than the first film, but every bit as engaging. Put it this way: All of the villains get the comeuppance you've been hoping for, but not without the heroes paying a heavy price. --Marshall Fine
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