The Return of the Musketeers

Given the passing of Roy Kinnear during filming, following a heart attack after he fell from a horse, it's understandable that The Return of the Musketeers is very much a passionless slog. Richard Lester's film largely abandons the omniscient perspective taken in previous instalments, that saw overdressed figures battering their way across lavishly appointed sets complete with ADR grumbles, to hand over proceedings almost completely to Michael York's D'Artagnan. The now-ageing lieutenant is given a voiceover to accompany his misfiring adventures, a move that further diminishes the ironic framing that accentuated Lester's previous entries. We are no longer observing a rock star swordfighter who professes undying love for his kidnapped mistress while sleeping with any woman who'll have him. Now he's telling his own story, oblivious to his failings. Comedy and action are a difficult mix at the best of times, each having different tonal objectives that require a delicate, even masterful, touch to balance. Lester previously succeeded through a knowing incongruity: elements that veered into the absurd - be that the character's actions or the situations they found themselves in - were always contrasted with a palpable sense of real, physical danger. Here, nothing is presented as serious (and nothing can be taken seriously anyway) so the film becomes joyless noise. If Return has an ace up its sleeve though, it's a sozzled-looking Oliver Reed as Athos. Although rarely deployed, the actor is instantly able to confer weight and meaning to every little trifle he utters. 

The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady)

The second half of Richard Lester's Alexandre Dumas adaptation doesn't have the best start. The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) begins with a lengthy recap of the first part before plunging headfirst into a war between Catholic France and insurrectionist Protestants (backed by England) that has made allies out of former foes. This rough gear shift is matched by an assembly that makes enormous leaps in location; a structural restlessness that - if we're being generous - does echo the fidget energies that pour out of Michael York's D'Artagnan. To Lester's film credit, when it does settle down Four Musketeers finds itself more excited about charting the homicidal pettiness of Faye Dunaway's wonderful take on Milady than it does the adventures of a young swashbuckler. That this spy is capricious and vengeful is an understatement. She lives to be adored: Milady enjoying and luxuriating in the power imbalance that her beauty both implies and ensures. Perhaps there are deeper motives in play in The Four Musketeers when it comes to Milady's studied hatred of D'Artagnan and his mistress, Raquel Welch's Constance? If that is the case, we are not privy to them. 

A greater familiarity with Dumas' text might reveal some crumb of logic powering the murderous machinations of the literary Milady but the through line here seems to be one of pure spite. Dunaway's performance reeks of jealousy. She flattered the socially inferior D'Artagnan with her physical affections and is appalled that he not only rejected her (moments after having slept with her) but did so out of his desire for another woman. There's a sense that because D'Artagnan thwarted Milady in her attempts to overwhelm and intoxicate, that a correction is now demanded. Does she believe that the murder of Constance changes something in her and D'Artagnan's relationship? Will he finally submit himself wholly to her insidious charms? We see elsewhere the intended effects of the sexuality that Milady wields so effectively. Captured by the British, her heaving bosom is enough to ensnare a pompous and puritanical jailor, setting him up to be the useful idiot in a political assassination plot. Matching Dunaway for unexpected (and therefore enjoyable) turbulence is Oliver Reed as Athos. The actor glowers, suggesting a three-dimensionality of character largely through a nagging sense of distraction. He talks to the other Musketeers but never truly looks at them. He's staring off into space; his attentions elsewhere and, obviously, churning. 

As with the first instalment, The Three Musketeers, characters are dressed throughout in their finery, requiring that the actors puppeteering these enormous outfits exert incredible amounts of energy just to get the layered petticoats and embroidered tabards moving. Rather than shy away with rapid cutting, Lester embraces this awkwardness of motion, making it a key component in all of the film's lengthy and largely observed swordfights. Panting duellists must cope with the frustrations and exhaustions inherent to their ostentatious dress. Mishaps and accidents are equally allowed to exert themselves on the unfolding dramas, complicating and enhancing the film's exhilarating sense of drunken danger. That The Four Musketeers takes place during a war has constant purchase within Lester's mise en scene too, one that extends beyond the establishing shots of ruined chateaus or billowing cannon lines. The Three Musketeers featured a series of animated tableaus in which members of the thoughtless ruling class battered through the slogging efforts of a downtrodden (and mumbling) working class. Four Musketeers takes the same basic unexamined toil concept but tweaks the parameters, allowing for far more callous scenery. An absurd picnic, attended by Charlton Heston's Cardinal Richelieu and Geraldine Chaplin's Queen Anne, comes complete with a portable organ built into a horse carriage and, in the near distance, several Protestants dangling from a hanging tree. No reveller bats an eyelid. The beautiful people chat and snack on without interruption. It's a sight gag that wouldn't be out of place in Ken Russell's similarly excellent The Devils. 

Supergirl

Jeannot Szwarc's Supergirl sits in a completely different genre to the Christopher Reeve films that preceded it. Whereas the series that Richard Donner kicked-off began as something close to a Biblical epic (before slowly evolving into Richard Lester's sight-gag generator), Supergirl is nearer to magical fantasy. It's flippant, even irreverent in how it presents and organises the iconography of its super-characters, most obviously in how Helen Slater's Kara spontaneously assumes the family costume seconds after arriving on Earth. New identity in place, Supergirl skips around weightlessly, ballet dancing across a tree line. The stakes are immediately lower; this superhero is allowed a moment to enjoy their unfathomable powers. 

Szwarc's film posits a cultural collision: how does a child raised in a sub-atomic commune react to life in a comparatively strange, bra-snapping boarding school? Helen Slater's Supergirl (barely a character in her own story) is an innocent, the kind of guileless, put-upon waif you'd see in British girl's comics of the 1970s and early 80s. Her worries, like those of the IPC heroines seen in weeklies like Tammy or Misty, are kept small. Will her human identity hold up to scrutiny? Can she win the school groundskeeper away from Faye Dunaway's much older, and therefore sexually experienced, witch Selena? Real danger, and any of the trauma that would normally linger afterwards, is tidied far away from the main plot.

The wider implications of Kara's public and private dilemmas are drowned out by a meandering storyline far more concerned with Selena bumbling her way into total dominion over a one-horse town. Given that Slater is a newcomer, it's an understandable decision to dedicate so much of the film's runtime to Selena's ascension. Nevertheless, the Supergirl character does offer something conceptually distinct from Reeve's hero. Kara's approach to her superpowers is much more covert than her cousin, she rarely overwhelms obstacles, preferring instead to neutralise them with a well aimed upset. Her adventure also takes her deeper into the Action Comics mythos, briefly stranding her in The Phantom Zone prison proposed during the opening act of Superman: The Movie. Zod's former lock-up is a crumbling landscape filled with swirling, blood red storms and an intoxicating Kryptonite sludge. More importantly though it's a physical and mental trial for Kara that must be overcome without the benefit of Earth's yellow Sun.

The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers froths with exuberant, youthful energy. Director Richard Lester is a dab hand at capturing this liveliness, his films revolving around the breathless vitality present in young men desperate to make a name for themselves. Lester channels their exhilaration, crafting visual scenarios that convey an explosive kind of excitement. With A Hard Day's Night Lester took the runaway popularity of The Beatles and transformed it as a series of static, telephoto shots of screaming youths running directly into the camera. In adapting Alexandre Dumas' d'Artagnan romances, Lester starts with Michael York, whip thin and beaming, then allows the actor to hurl himself about the screen, clearly having the time of his life.

The film's sword fights track with this conceit, packaging expert jousting within scrappy, spontaneous confrontations. Any object left lying around can and will be used as a weapon: Oliver Reed's brooding Athos, for instance, never fails to hurl his floppy, wide-brimmed hat directly into his opponent's face. The goal for these clashes is never really to kill either, instead the combatants seek to humiliate each other by either drawing first blood or by booting any inattentive enemies up the arse. Lester and screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser laser in on the flippant, moneyed absurdity of the 17th century's ruling classes, interpreting their adventures as terrifying flights of fancy, driven by brain-dead and terminally horny aristocrats. Lester is an obsessive entertainer too, layering his frame with slapstick sight gags and grumbling commoners who can always be relied upon to skewer the oblivious, oversexed lords and ladies.

Superman III

Do you know why Superman III is great? It puts the Clark Kent / Superman dichotomy front and centre, drawing dramatic premises out of the turbulent emotional state created by two separate identities sharing the same vessel. It also allows Christopher Reeve to flex his jerk muscle. The film begins with Kent feeling a little unloved at work - Perry White is busy ignoring malfunctioning bingo machines and, after their amnesia kiss in Superman II, Lois Lane is back to being an indifferent co-worker. With very little to keep him in Metropolis Kent pops back to Smallville for his High School reunion, spending some time with his teenage crush, Annette O'Toole's Lana Lang.

Lang is a distinct romantic proposition in these Superman films. Unlike Lois, who is first and foremost besotted with the Man of Steel, Lana is actually interested in the human Clark Kent, recognising his innate goodness as an opportunity for long-term emotional stability. For balance, she also views his decision to move away from their small town as exciting and forward-thinking. He's the complete package. Leslie Newman and David Newman's screenplay doesn't really do much with Lana and Clark's relationship beyond proposing it as a road bump along the route to Superman's human persona and Lois finding each other but the structure is there for, at the very least, some Silver Age two-timing in the next instalment.

Superman III seizes on the fracture Lana and Lois' disparate interests propose then, thanks to a blazing crystal of synthetic Kryptonite provided by Richard Pryor's Gus Gorman, uses the idea to power action scenes grounded in Superman's shattering sense of self. Poisoned by the radioactive rock Superman starts to degrade and corrupt, his hair loses its immaculate styling, he gets a 5 o'clock shadow and his bright, primary coloured cape curdles into a rusty, carmine red. This split comes to a head in a scrap yard filled with gutted automobiles. Superman and Kent disentangle from each other, two opposing ideas battling for control of the whole. It's a dazzling sequence, skipping delicately between director Richard Lester's fine comedic detailing and the terrifying proposition of a Superman governed by his oozing, reptilian brain.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

What's interesting about this home video re-edit of Superman II is that it's a purely speculative recalibration, designed as the concluding chapter to a version of Superman: The Movie that doesn't even exist. Originally Superman was to end with the Man of Steel averting nuclear disaster by punting one of Luthor's ICBMs into space, thus freeing the Phantom Zone Kryptonians. The time rewind finale that played at the end of the released Superman was to be saved for the sequel, with Clark playing God to undo the ruin Zod has made of Earth.

Assembled from as much Donner footage as possible, and hung on a bare frame of Richard Lester's work, this approximate cut does much to undo the eccentricities of Lester's sequel. Zod's presence is clipped and fleeting, ditching much of the culture clash hysteria. Greater emphasis is placed on Zod's hatred for Jor-El, recontextualising Zod's aimless bullying of Earth as a necessary dithering before Superman appears. Likewise Superman's dabble with humanhood is bracketed with Godhead projections of Marlon Brando's Jor-El pleading with his lovesick son to keep a cool head. The scenes between Reeve and Brando vibrate as the full messianic subtext of Superman is explored.

Dressed as a human, Superman outlines his desire to live with Lois as a human. Jor-El calls him selfish, saying that making one person his focus contravenes the mission. He cannot commit to both. Superman rages, knowing his father is right. He is thinking only of himself, but doesn't he deserve to? Hasn't he earned the right to explore his own desires? What's interesting is how centred and calm Jor-El is. The phantom projections of the Fortress of Solitude blur the line between simulation personality, recording, and actual soul fragment. Here Brando delicately and patiently outlines the folly, while providing the means with which to perform it. Richard Donner's Superman II presents a messianic predicament but firmly contextualises it in emotionally human terms. The father is willing to do what he sees as an ethical wrong in order to provide a happiness for his child. Likewise, when it all does go wrong, the same father is equally prepared to extinguish the half life that remains to him in order to restore the super-man. Christian doctrine is inverted as the father lays down his life for the son.

In Lester's film Superman's power shrink was an artificial obstacle to allow Zod a speedy dominion. It also presented Kal-El as a dimwit, blind to his other half's desires. In Lester's II it often appears that the clumsy Clark identity is the root personality, that the poised Superman is the elaborate act. In Richard Donner's II Superman is the clearly the true state of this man.

Superman II

Sired by a deeply troubled production that saw the original saga director Richard Donner junked in favour of Richard Lester's lighter, financially tighter, touch; Superman II perseveres as an entertaining muddle of faintly clashing ideas. Lester's jokey, exaggerated tone actually compliments Donner's big city living. It's as if mankind has gone slightly insane now that the world has a tangible messiah. Everyone acts large, and people take catastrophic risks, assured that they now have a super-safety net should they fall. Is this what inspires Superman's weariness? In Superman II, he seems awfully eager to throw away his powers and position when an office romance opportunity arises. Pratfalls aside, Lois's discovery of Clark's secret identity could be contextualised as a passive aggressive cry for help. Otherwise, are we to believe a God thing that can alter the trajectory of time has serious trouble navigating a rug? With Superman stuck in a navel gazing funk, it falls to Terence Stamp's Zod to bring the fun.

Stamp plays Zod as an autistic vandal, utterly bewildered by anything that doesn't immediately abdicate to his whim. His lack of understanding actually disqualifies his actions as broadly evil, Zod often seems more like a bored aristocratic degenerate playing at being a tyrant. His defining criminal act on Krypton is breaking something that doesn't belong to him. We are given no sense of calamitous sedition, simply that Jor-El possess a bright sparkly toy, so a jealous Zod must snap it. He's a child. It's easy to imagine Zod has a doting, moneyed Kryptonian mother somewhere, always eager to bail her special little soldier out his latest mischief. On earth, his entire agenda is built around a playground bully's idea of submission. He just wants everyone to agree that he's the best. All this makes Zod completely excellent to watch. He has no interest in Earth, and makes no attempt to understand anything. He's instantly bored with any success, and reveals no wider master plan other than cursory subjugation. He has no use for Earth or anyone on it. He just wants their tribute. Kneel before Zod.