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. 

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.