One for All

By JAY COCKS

THE THREE MUSKETEERS Directed by RICHARD LESTER Screenplay by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

There is a certain giddiness that this movie instills, a sense of being royally entertained. The Three Musketeers is a surfeit of pleasures. It can be said, simply and with thanks, that it is an absolutely terrific movie.

It was fashioned with a wonderful skill and high humor. A translation of Dumas' story, even a fairly respectful one, it is simultaneously a satire, sometimes antic, sometimes serious, a send-up of the whole tradition of romantic fiction. Such an accomplishment seems paradoxical, but the movie successfully cuts both ways, largely because Richard Lester is a film maker who specializes in standing paradox on its ear.

A special joy is that this is Lester's first film since the wizardly but little-seen Bed Sitting Room, which played in the U.S. in 1969 for approximately the time it would take to soft-boil an egg. Lester made his reputation from his two gymnastic Beatles movies, but his later work (most notably How I Won the War and Petulia) disclosed a deeper, even more enterprising talent--one tempered by a pointed satiric force. The Three Musketeers is not so astringent; it is ebullient, full of roughhouse, and careens along on its own high spirits.

Lester has taken the tone of The Three Musketeers from Scenarist Fraser, whose Flashman novels Lester once tried to adapt. The Fraser books are full of the kind of self-deflating braggadocio, the same sort of elaborate but inglorious combats one finds here. Heroics are mocked, survival is championed. The musketeers are made into creatures whose absurdities of conduct, florid codes of honor and hollow protestations of heroism make them all the more recognizable and human. It is their own faint absurdity that makes them true.

Chess Games. The streets and taverns of 17th century Paris here teem with vignettes of squalor (two men playing a seesaw game over a fire for a prize of food) that make their own comment set against the distant pomp of the royal court. The musketeers move through both these worlds with equal ease, yet are part of neither. Their sworn allegiance is to the King, Louis XIII, and against Richelieu, but they are men of pride. Their greatest battle and concern are simply to stay alive. For though they would call themselves their own men, they belong to Louis--pawns like the pet dogs he uses for his life-size games of chess in the gardens.

The musketeers--Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Michael York as D'Artagnan--all perform admirably. When the casting threatens to become too capricious (Raquel Welch as the Queen's confidante, Faye Dunaway as the archvillainess, Charlton Heston as Richelieu), Lester exploits the absurdity. He made the discovery, for example, that Welch and Dunaway, for all their physical dissimilarity, are basically the same actress. So a climactic brawl between them is funny not just for itself but because of the two people playing them.

Cinematographer David Watkin has made the film ravishing to look at. There is even a happy ending: two of them, in fact. Everyone--musketeers, ladies, regents and villains--receives his just deserts and retribution as the occasion demands. The rest of us get the promise of a sequel soon to be delivered. It seems that the producers decided to make two movies for the price of one. They cut Musketeers in half, and will release the parts separately. This one is subtitled The Queen's Diamond; the next will be called The Revenge of Milady.

Jay Cocks

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