One For All: The New Musketeers

"If we can make films that are useful as well as entertaining, marvelous," says Director Richard Lester. "But cinema must reflect the temper of the times. We must choose material not only on the basis of what we feel deeply, but on whether or not anybody's bloody well going to see it."

It has taken the 42-year-old Lester 15 years of seesawing the highs and lows of moviemaking to reach that conclusion. Lester shot to prominence as the director of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), followed by the surreal comedy The Knack (1965). He quickly became the hottest new director around; his trick-camera, quick-cut editing had a breezy spontaneity that spoke for the swinging London of the '60s. With the artistic freedom that success can buy, Lester then turned his comedic scattergun to more serious and deeply felt purpose. Starting in 1967 he made one troubling social satire about modern materialists (Petulia) and two savage antiwar polemics (How I Won the War and The Bed-Sitting Room). All three fizzled at the box office, and by 1969 Lester found himself effectively out of the movie business.

Now, with his first film in five years, Lester has returned to light farce and good fortune. In its first ten days of release in the U.S., Lester's new version of Alexandre Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers has brought in more than $3.5 million--a hefty indication that what audiences bloody well want to see is sheer entertainment. Meticulously constructed, broadly funny and relatively chaste, The Three Musketeers is a film for the whole family, and one that is not about children or animals.

The film tells the familiar tale of those beloved cavaliers Athos (Oliver

Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) and D'Artagnan (Michael York). But Lester has added to their motto, "All for one and one for all," his own realistic coda: "And every man for himself." His musketeers are mercenaries, albeit loyal ones, and their adventures occur on the mud-puddled roads and in the filthy rooms of 17th century France.

Dumas' story has a prodigal range of appeal: the grandeur of the court of Louis XIII; the scandalous romance between his Queen and England's Chief Minister, the Duke of Buckingham; the political intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu; and most of all, the high-flying exploits of young Musketeer-Aspirant D'Artagnan and his three companions as they battle to foil the Cardinal's schemes and thus cover themselves with glory, honor and material reward.

Off and Romping. Lester's film has all this and more--sophisticated satire, opulent costumes, crashing swordplay, and a feast of historical fact--noblemen sniff clove-studded oranges as they walk through grimily Hogarthian streets; the King plays chess on a lawn-drawn board, with the palace dogs his four-footed chess pieces. Within this lovingly recreated world, Lester's musketeers are off and romping through an audacious barrage of pratfalls, sight gags, tottering demises and improbable acrobatics reminiscent of silent comedies.

Here are musketeers who miss, constantly swashing their buckles right in the wrong places. D'Artagnan furiously swings out on a rope to unhorse an adversary, only to swing right past both horse and rider and come down in a pool of mud. Athos, about to finish off an enemy, finds himself suddenly hooked by the collar and lifted into the air by a giant, donkey-powered water wheel. D'Artagnan's love, the comely Constance (Raquel Welch), wafts innocently through it all, knocking over vases, dropping pots and pans and sweetly stepping into spitoons.

Lester stages elaborately orchestrated free-for-alls. He takes a secret meeting between the Queen (Geraldine Chaplin) and her lover, the Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), out of the Queen's apartments and into the royal laundry room, turning it into a magnificently messy melee between the Musketeers and the Cardinal's guards--a riot of indigo dye in the face, lathery soap slides, and wickedly glorious slaughter.

Lester filled up the space around The Three Musketeers with a multiplicity of fascinating objects that really work. He found or had reproduced an awesome collection of 1620s artifacts such as coaches, farm implements, machinery and games. Almost every scene has someone playing at something historically accurate--greased pole seesaw matches, a candle-powered pinball apparatus, a form of bowling in which the targets are life-size cutouts of ladies.

He also reproduced the crude, battering sword play of the era. Since Lester avoids using stunt men, he nearly did in a few of his actors: Reed took a blade thrust through the wrist; Christopher Lee (Rochefort) was stabbed in the side; York almost lost an eye from a miscalculated blow. "That kind of thing was worth it to get the effect Dick wanted," says Reed. "But you could break your bloody back riding without stirrups or saddles as we often had to do."

The complications involved in transporting 200 crewmen and hundreds of extras, cows, chickens, pigs and horses across 55 different locations in Spain, left almost no time for rehearsals. Lester often rolled his cameras straightaway at preliminary run-throughs, a tactic occasionally rewarded by such accidental verites as Raquel Welch's spraining her arm during a fight sequence with Faye Dunaway (Milady), or Roy Kinnear (Planchet) taking a thudding fall when his horse collided with a tree. Both "rehearsals" are in the finished film. "There is a quality of excitement and tension when actors are not quite sure what they're doing," says Lester with a nearly straight face.

General Anarchy. The organizer of all this genial mayhem is a Philadelphia-born expatriate who sidestepped into a job as a local TV director after earning a degree in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Lester gravitated to England in 1955 and discovered his real niche as a BBC television director. With British Comedians Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, he put together a series of TV comedies that featured outrageous sight gags, vertiginous action and general anarchy.

His early films drew freely on this brand of madness. They also reflected Lester's singular point of view: "I like to look for the absurd in any reality, to see the flies on the pillows in the love scenes. I've always longed to go round to the back of the television news announcer and see that he has no trousers on as he reads the news." Lester's flip view of reality is couched almost entirely in visual terms. "I start from the props and work up," he explains. "I love toys. I find them funnier than people."

For moviegoers, the box office success of the Musketeers means a sequel. Hardly surprising, except that this time the follow-up picture is already in the can. The original four-hour film has been chopped in half, and the producers worked out new financial arrangements with irate actors who found they had made two films for the price of one. The sequel will be released at Christmas.

For Lester, the Musketeers' bonanza means a film making comeback. He has just returned to London from a ship in the North Sea, where he has been shooting his next film, a thriller called Juggernaut about a hijacking on the high seas. This time the man who loves toys has a whole ocean liner to play with.

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