Amazon.com Essentials:
Director Richard Lester strikes the perfect balance between
slapstick and swashbuckling swordplay in this whimsical adaptation of
Alexandre Dumas's grand adventure. Michael York, all innocence and wide-eyed
chivalry as young D'Artagnan, makes quite an impression on his first day in
Paris: he challenges all three of the legendary Musketeers to a duel, then
joins them in arms against the cardinal's soldiers. The worldly rascals, led
by Athos (Oliver Reed), who hides his brooding past behind a sarcastic wit,
adopt the young hero. Soon D'Artagnan is stealing hearts and stealing food
with equal aplomb as he joins their campaign to defend the queen (Geraldine
Chaplin) against a plot devised by the scheming cardinal (Charlton Heston)
and his cold-hearted accomplice Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway). Richard
Chamberlain's Aramis, the trio's Don Juan and resident man of God, and Frank
Finlay's fun-loving hedonist Porthos round out the Musketeers, while
Christopher Lee's sneering Rochefort executes the cardinal's wishes as
commander of the church's soldiers. Other members of this talented cast
include Raquel Welch as the beautiful but disaster-prone seamstress to the
queen, Spike Milligan as the beauty's jealous husband, Roy Kinnear as
D'Artagnan's bumbling servant, Planchet, and Jean-Pierre Cassel as the
clueless king. George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking screenplay combines
boisterous adventure and roguish humor with marvelous characters, and
Lester's dynamic direction turns it into one of the greatest comic
swashbucklers of all time. Followed by The Four Musketeers, which
continues the story in a darker vein. --Sean Axmaker
