Naive, arrogant D’Artagnan (Gene Kelly) travels to Paris to join the musketeers. After a rocky start, he befriends the three finest members of that guard, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (Van Heflin, Gig Young, Robert Coote). The four become involved in defending France and the queen (Angela Lansbury) from the schemes of the dastardly Minister Richelieu (Vincent Price) and his assassin, Lady de Winter (Lana Turner).
Dumas’s tale of pre-revolutionary French swordsmen defines literary Swashbucklers. So why can no one get it right on film? The best cinematic renditions have been mediocre, missing the magic, adventure, and humor of The Adventures of Robin Hood and Scaramouche, and this isn’t the best. Or even the second best.
The Three Musketeers won the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography, and I agree with the academy. The color is vibrant and effective. It’s never a good sign when I have to discuss the color to find something that works in a movie. But after color, things go down hill. Not into the depths of incompetence and total disaster, but to the more mundane level of adequacy and nearly-diverting.
The studio, or director George Sidney, or screenwriter Robert Ardrey never got the tone under control. At times it is the type of over-the-top pure fantasy that only works in a musical. Other times it goes for tragedy (and nearly achieves melodrama). It fills in the rest with teen comedy antics, which is unseemly when the teens are thirty-six to thirty-nine year old men.
Kelly’s athleticism is impressive, and he can manage leaps that make most swashbuckling stars hide in jealous embarrassment. However, even in the world of fake film swordsmen, he looks particularly unreal. That wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the film acknowledged it, played with the fantasy, dance-like swordplay instead of treating it as authentic. His moves are little different than the ones he used in the ballet in The Pirate. If everyone would break into a soft shoe from time to time, then this might have worked. It might even have allowed me to forget that D’Artagnan is at least ten years too old.
The rest of the star-studded cast does its job. Both Lana Turner and June Allyson tried to get out of the production, but onscreen they don’t look any more out of place than anyone else. Van Heflin, Gig Young, Robert Coote, Angela Lansbury, Keenan Wynn, and Vincent Price don’t show up enough to judge them. Think of them as having long cameos, leaving more time for Kelly’s uneasy romantic trials.
Perhaps there’s just too much story. Most filmmakers have chopped the book in half. Trying to cover it all makes this a video Cliffs Notes. Love is instantaneous, entire plot threads last only a few minutes, and there’s no time to for anything to develop.
In 1952, an entire swordfight from The Three Musketeers was plopped into the classic Singing in the Rain. It was used to represent the over-done, silly, blustery silent pictures that Don Lockwood had been making. It works great there, but in its original state, where we’re supposed to be excited by the action, it is still over-done, silly, and blustery.
My reviews of Gene Kelly musicals: Cover Girl (1944), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954).