“Is she about to chuck a pie at us?” thought Constance. “Ah, she’s such a vindictive woman!”
The Three Musketeers (1973) is the Michael York & a cloud of stars version of the old and venerable tale. This is the most comedic version of the old tale that I’ve seen, ranging from broad farce to subtle presentation of an English Duke completing an assignation with a French Queen in a laundry in the basement of the French palace, and includes such touches as capturing the offhand mutterings of characters, the disposal of slops and worse out the building windows onto passing traffic, that might be suppressed in a more dignified retelling of the story.
In terms of the story, there’s little enough out of the ordinary: D’Artagnan is dispatched to Paris by his sword-master and former Musketeer father to seek fame, fortune, fighting, and women. He encounters Rochefort and is insulted by Rochefort’s disdain for D’Artagnan’s Gascony homeland; later, as he attempts to arrange a duel with Rochefort, he inadvertently schedules duels with the eponymous trio of musketeers. Interrupted by the Palace guard for brawling, they and D’Artagnan pummel the guard and befriend D’Artagnan. From Constance to the Queen’s assignation with the Duke, and her gift of a rememberance to the Duke, and then Cardinal Richelieu’s devious request for a masked ball at which the rememberance should be displayed, it’s all here, executed with flair, dash, and the occasional bit of clumsiness. As a fencer, I appreciate the clumsiness, it enhances my self-esteem.
This is what I grew up on, and its carefree approach to heroism is a lesson in itself.
Still, it shows its age a little bit. Constance is distressingly helpless, and the disparate lives of the various classes can be appalling for those audience members not conscious of the utility of fidelity to social realities in period storytelling. And if you need your heroes to be ridiculously buff and testosterone-ridden, go elsewhere for your entertainment. Michael York, playing the lead, might be described as ripped, but he’s built like a collection of toothpicks, and he’s not the only such actor.
It’s too light-hearted and, to be frank, shallow to recommend, but if you haven’t seen it, if you like sword-play and quick wit and plain silliness, and have a couple of hours to while away, this might be a candidate for your time.
