The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) Review

I’ve watched these two films more times than I can count. They’re the best adaptation of Dumas ever put on screen. Nothing else comes close. The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) are one nearly four-hour Richard Lester production cut in half because the producers were running a scam. The scam is part of the story. The films are still the best version of the material that exists.

Lester accomplished something almost no Hollywood production manages, and the 10+++ rating shows it. He made a swashbuckler that’s funny without losing the swashbuckling. He cast the right actor in every role. He hired the best fight choreographer in the business. He let George MacDonald Fraser write the screenplay, and Fraser delivered Dumas as Dumas should be delivered.

The result is two films that work as adventure, as comedy, as romance, as tragedy, and as period drama at the same time. Most adaptations pick one tone. Lester ran all five.

The Production

Alexander and Ilya Salkind produced the films. The same Salkinds who would later make Superman with Christopher Reeve. They had a habit. The habit was telling actors they were making one film, then splitting the footage into two films and releasing them separately.

The actors got paid for one film. The Salkinds collected on two. The Screen Actors Guild eventually created a rule about this. The rule is called the Salkind Clause. It requires producers to specify in advance how many films will be made from a given production.

The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are the reason that clause exists.

The cast was furious when they found out. Several actors sued.

The settlements were eventually paid. The films still came out. The lawsuits didn’t damage the work itself because Lester had already finished shooting before the dispute became public. What he’d shot was already excellent. The Salkinds were terrible producers and shrewd businessmen. The films exist because they greenlit them. The films are good because Lester made them.

Richard Lester had previously directed A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and The Knack …and How to Get It. He understood comic timing at the level of physical choreography.

He understood that physical comedy works best when the actors take it seriously. Period costume drama, he understood, becomes interesting when the characters treat the period as their actual everyday life instead of as an exhibition of historical detail. All three understandings show up in every frame of both films.

The Cast

Michael York plays D’Artagnan as the country boy he’s supposed to be.

The character arrives in Paris from Gascony with no money, no connections, and absurd confidence. York commits to the absurdity. He plays D’Artagnan as a young man who believes he’s the equal of any musketeer he meets, even when the evidence in front of him suggests otherwise. The performance is the foundation the films build on. Every other character reacts to D’Artagnan. If the audience doesn’t buy D’Artagnan, the films collapse. York sells him completely.

Oliver Reed plays Athos as a wounded aristocrat who drinks because he can’t face what he did to his wife.

The performance is quieter than Reed’s reputation suggests. He had a public image as a hellraiser. He turned that image off for this role and played the haunted nobleman instead. The scene where Athos finally tells the story of Milady is the dramatic center of the second film. Reed delivers it without raising his voice. The discipline is the achievement.

Reed is the performance I point to when I explain why these films outclass every other version. On paper he’s the wrong man for a haunted nobleman, and he makes the paper look foolish. Watch his face while the others clown around him. He’s somewhere else, carrying something heavy, and that weight gives the whole comic machine a floor to stand on.

Frank Finlay plays Porthos as exactly what Porthos is supposed to be. Loud, vain, brave, and not very bright. The vanity makes the character work. Porthos cares about his clothes, his reputation, and being seen as the most magnificent of the four. Finlay plays the vanity straight. That makes it funny without ever becoming a joke at Porthos’s expense.

Richard Chamberlain plays Aramis as the would-be priest who keeps getting distracted by women. The combination shouldn’t work. Chamberlain makes it work by playing both halves with equal sincerity. Aramis intends to enter the church. He also can’t stop sleeping with duchesses. The contradiction is the character.

Charlton Heston As Richelieu

Charlton Heston playing Cardinal Richelieu is the casting that shouldn’t work and does. Heston was an American action star with a voice trained for biblical epics. Richelieu was a French churchman whose power came from being the smartest person in any room. The mismatch on paper is severe. The performance on screen is one of Heston’s best.

Heston plays Richelieu as a man who has spent thirty years handling the politics of the French court and who finds D’Artagnan and his friends interesting because they’re unpredictable.

The Cardinal isn’t the villain. The Cardinal is the chief minister of France attempting to manage a queen with a wandering eye and a king who can’t read his own councils. The musketeers are obstacles to the Cardinal’s work. The Cardinal doesn’t hate them. He just needs them out of the way.

The scene where Richelieu offers D’Artagnan a commission in his own guards is the centerpiece of Heston’s performance.

The Cardinal recognizes talent and would prefer that talent work for him instead of against him. The offer is genuine. D’Artagnan turns it down out of loyalty to the musketeers. The Cardinal accepts the refusal without anger because the loyalty is exactly the quality he was recruiting. Heston plays the entire exchange without any of his usual theatrical bombast. The restraint is the performance.

Faye Dunaway As Milady

Faye Dunaway plays Milady de Winter as one of the great villains in adventure cinema. The character is supposed to be beautiful, deadly, brilliant, and damaged. Most adaptations get one or two of those four.

Dunaway delivers all four at the same time. She’s the reason the second film works at the level it does. The Four Musketeers is the Milady film. Athos is her former husband. D’Artagnan beds her under false pretenses. The Duke of Buckingham trusts her. The Queen confides in her.

Constance Bonacieux dies because of her. Every major plot in the second film passes through Milady.

Dunaway plays her without softening any of the cruelty. The character strangles a young woman with rosary beads. She seduces her jailer into freeing her. She orchestrates a political assassination across international borders. None of this is played for sympathy. Milady isn’t redeemed. Milady isn’t understood. Milady is simply a woman who decided long ago that she’d survive whatever the world threw at her, and the methods she’s developed for surviving have consequences for everyone she encounters.

The execution scene at the end of the second film is one of the harder sequences to watch in 1970s cinema. Milady is condemned. The executioner is summoned. Her former husband Athos delivers the verdict. The musketeers stand witness. Dunaway plays Milady’s final moments with the same refusal to perform innocence that she’s maintained throughout. She knows what she’s done and what’s happening to her, and she doesn’t beg. The scene is brutal because it’s honest.

The films don’t soften the execution of a woman who deserves her execution.

Dunaway is why the second film hits harder for me than the first. The execution scene unsettles me. Lester doesn’t cheat it. He doesn’t hand Milady a reprieve or a speech that makes us forgive her, and he makes the musketeers stand there and own what they’ve decided. I respect a swashbuckler with the nerve to go there.

The Sword Choreography

William Hobbs choreographed the fights. Hobbs is the best fight choreographer in the history of period cinema. His work on these films redefined what swordplay could look like on screen. Before Hobbs, movie sword fights were elegant exchanges of measured blows between actors trained to look balletic.

Hobbs threw all of that out. His sword fights are messy, dirty, exhausting, and full of improvisation. Characters trip. Characters grab anything within reach. Characters get tired. Characters use the environment.

The tavern fight in the first film shows the approach. D’Artagnan and the musketeers fight Richelieu’s guards using barrels, ladders, hanging meat, water troughs, and at one point a live chicken.

The combatants don’t stand in elegant en garde positions. They move, they push, they grab, they fall. The fight runs for several minutes and the audience can follow it the entire time because Hobbs choreographed it as a sequence of distinct physical actions instead of as a continuous flow of blade exchanges.

That tavern brawl is my favorite fight in any costume picture. It’s funny and it’s violent, and I never lose track of who’s where or what they’re grabbing next. The chicken gets a big laugh without costing the fight any of its danger. I measure every screen sword fight against this one, and most of them come up short.

Every later serious period swordfight in cinema borrows from Hobbs.

Rob Roy borrows from him directly. Hobbs choreographed the final duel in Rob Roy twenty years later using the same principles. The Princess Bride borrows from him. Game of Thrones borrows from him. The whole genre works inside vocabulary Hobbs developed for these two Lester films.

The Comic Timing

Roy Kinnear plays Planchet, D’Artagnan’s servant. Kinnear was a Lester regular.

He appeared in Help! and How I Won the War before these films. He understood that physical comedy works best when the character doesn’t know he’s being funny. Planchet is loyal, brave, terrified, hungry, and consistently in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kinnear plays him as a man trying to do his job under increasingly impossible circumstances. The performance is one of the great supporting turns in 1970s adventure cinema.

Spike Milligan plays Monsieur Bonacieux, Constance’s older husband. Milligan was a founding member of the Goon Show. He had a manic comic energy that Lester deployed strategically. Bonacieux is on screen for only a few sequences. Milligan turns each appearance into a small set piece. The character is a fool, a coward, and an idiot. Milligan plays him at full volume without ever quite tipping into caricature.

The Buckingham sequences in London show Lester running comic timing at scale. The Duke of Buckingham, played by Simon Ward, receives Constance Bonacieux in his palace. The scene includes elaborate court protocol, multiple servants, formal introductions, and the Duke trying to maintain dignity while clearly being lovestruck by the news that the Queen has sent for him.

Lester films the whole sequence with the same attention to detail he gave the Beatles films. The comedy emerges from the precision of the staging.

The Source Material

George MacDonald Fraser wrote the screenplay. Fraser was the author of the Flashman novels. He understood Dumas at a level most screenwriters can’t reach. The Flashman books are themselves adventures in the Dumas tradition with a deliberately unheroic protagonist. Fraser had spent years studying how Dumas built scenes, how Dumas paced revelations, how Dumas balanced comedy and danger. The screenplay for these two films reflects all of that study.

Fraser kept more of the novel’s plot than most adaptations attempt. He kept the full Diamond Studs sequence, the full Milady arc, the London sequences, and the political background with Richelieu, Queen Anne, and King Louis XIII. Most film adaptations of Dumas compress the novel into ninety minutes and lose half the plot. Fraser had nearly four hours and used all of them. Nothing essential to the novel is missing.

Fraser also preserved the tonal complexity of the source.

Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers as a serial for a Parisian newspaper. The book is funny, romantic, violent, political, and tragic in different chapters. Most adaptations pick the tone they prefer and cut the rest. Fraser kept all of them. The films modulate from comedy to swordplay to romance to political intrigue to torture and execution without any of the transitions feeling forced. The tonal range is the source. Fraser respected the source.

The Look

David Watkin shot both films. Watkin would later shoot Out of Africa and Chariots of Fire. His cinematography for these films established the visual vocabulary that all later period adventure productions would build on. The interiors are lit with practical sources.

The candles are real candles. The fires are real fires. The shadows are deep and historically accurate. Watkin avoided the bright Technicolor flat lighting that most 1960s period productions had used. He filmed seventeenth-century France as it would have looked to seventeenth-century French people.

The exteriors were shot largely in Spain because Spain in the early 1970s still contained landscapes and architecture that could pass for seventeenth-century France with minimal modification. The Spanish locations also kept production costs down, which the Salkinds appreciated. The visual result was a France that felt geographically real instead of studio-bound.

Michel Legrand composed the score for the first film, and Lalo Schifrin scored the second. Legrand was the French film composer of the era. His work on these films is restrained by his standards. He composed thematic material that supports the action without ever announcing itself. The musketeers have a theme. Milady has a theme. The Cardinal has a theme. The themes return with the right moments without ever becoming the kind of wall-to-wall scoring that later adventure films would adopt.

The Split

The Salkinds decided to release the production as two films instead of one for commercial reasons. The Three Musketeers came out in December 1973.

The Four Musketeers came out in March 1975 in the US and earlier in Europe. The split worked commercially. Both films were profitable. The first film was the bigger hit. That makes sense. It’s the introduction, with the lighter tone, the Buckingham sequences, the Diamond Studs plot, and the first major swordfight set pieces.

The second film is darker, more focused on Milady, and ends with an execution.

Audiences who watched both films in 1973 and 1975 experienced them as separate releases. Modern audiences should watch them back to back. That’s how Lester shot them. That’s how Fraser wrote them. The split into two films is a production accident. The work itself is one nearly four-hour epic about four men who become friends in extraordinary circumstances and what happens to them when a beautiful woman with a brand on her shoulder decides she’d prefer they all be dead.

Compared To Other Adaptations

The 1948 Gene Kelly version is a glossy MGM musical adventure that turns the material into a showpiece for Kelly’s athletic dancing. It’s enjoyable. It’s not Dumas. The 1993 Disney version with Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, and Chris O’Donnell is a Hollywood teen adventure that misses the entire point. It’s unwatchable. The 2011 Paul W.S. Anderson version with the airships and the steampunk nonsense is unwatchable in a different way.

The 2023 French two-film adaptation with Eva Green as Milady is the only recent attempt to take the material seriously. The French films are good. They’re not as good as Lester’s. The Lester films set a standard that later productions either match or fail against. Nothing has matched them yet.

Craft Note

Are The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers worth watching?

A 10+++. The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are the best adaptation of Dumas ever filmed. The casting is perfect across every major role. The screenplay preserves the full tonal range of the novel. The swordplay choreography redefined what period action could look like on screen. The cinematography established the visual vocabulary that later period productions still work within. The score supports the action without dominating it. The films work as adventure, as comedy, as romance, as political drama, and as tragedy at the same time.

Most adaptations pick one of those modes. Lester ran all five.

I’ve watched both films many times, and they pay off on every viewing. The comedy is sharp, the fights thrill me, and Milady’s arc lands like a punch. What holds it all together is the friendship between those four men. Three pluses on a 10 is me refusing to let any other version into the same conversation. Watch them back to back, forget the Salkinds ever split them, and see the film Lester shot.

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