Michael York's performance as country-boy-gone-to-the-city D'Artagnan in this film is such a touchstone that it allowed him to spend most of his adulthood making only guest appearances in middling films and television shows while remaining a major international star.
There have been other 'Musketeers' movies and other 'swashbuckler' films, but this 1973 film sits smack in the middle of the convergence of these two sub- (and sub-sub-) genres as the reigning best of both.
Charlton Heston chews scenery as Cardinal Richlieu, the main villain. Christopher Lee is marvelous as his pirate-horseman henchman Roquefort.
Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway are set against each other as the epitomes of female virtue and female enmity, respectively, and both are, it so happens, ravishingly beautiful and beautifully costumed in the production.
The soul and the greatest thrum of gravity are supplied by Oliver Reed as the Musketeer "Athos." Reed, a notoriously hard-living, wild-tempered actor, roils seas of pathos and also brotherly bonhomie within his character in this film, and his projected regrets over the impossibility of perfect love and also the encroachment of a soulless government in the person of the Cardinal and his crimson gendarmes add emotional heft.
This is a brilliantly and beautifully directed, edited, and shot film that yet does not take itself too seriously. The ethos of a Musketeer, as Dumas hagiographized them, is to find time for both fighting and frolic, and this movie strikes a proper balance in finding both.
There have been other 'Musketeers' movies and other 'swashbuckler' films, but this 1973 film sits smack in the middle of the convergence of these two sub- (and sub-sub-) genres as the reigning best of both.
Charlton Heston chews scenery as Cardinal Richlieu, the main villain. Christopher Lee is marvelous as his pirate-horseman henchman Roquefort.
Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway are set against each other as the epitomes of female virtue and female enmity, respectively, and both are, it so happens, ravishingly beautiful and beautifully costumed in the production.
The soul and the greatest thrum of gravity are supplied by Oliver Reed as the Musketeer "Athos." Reed, a notoriously hard-living, wild-tempered actor, roils seas of pathos and also brotherly bonhomie within his character in this film, and his projected regrets over the impossibility of perfect love and also the encroachment of a soulless government in the person of the Cardinal and his crimson gendarmes add emotional heft.
This is a brilliantly and beautifully directed, edited, and shot film that yet does not take itself too seriously. The ethos of a Musketeer, as Dumas hagiographized them, is to find time for both fighting and frolic, and this movie strikes a proper balance in finding both.