10+++ / 10
I have watched these two films more times than I can count. They are the best adaptation of Dumas ever put on screen. Nothing else comes close. The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) are not actually two films. They are one six-hour Richard Lester production cut in half because the producers were running a scam. The scam is part of the story. The films are still the best version of the material that exists.
The 10+++ rating reflects the fact that Lester accomplished something almost no Hollywood production manages. He made a swashbuckler that is genuinely funny without losing the swashbuckling. He cast the right actor in every role. He hired the best fight choreographer in the business. He let George MacDonald Fraser write the screenplay, and Fraser delivered Dumas as Dumas should be delivered. The result is two films that work as adventure, as comedy, as romance, as tragedy, and as period drama at the same time. Most adaptations pick one register. Lester ran all five.
The Production
Alexander and Ilya Salkind produced the films. The same Salkinds who would later make Superman with Christopher Reeve. They had a habit. The habit was telling actors they were making one film, then splitting the footage into two films and releasing them separately. The actors got paid for one film. The Salkinds collected on two. The Screen Actors Guild eventually created a rule about this. The rule is called the Salkind Clause. It requires producers to specify in advance how many films will be made from a given production. The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are the reason that clause exists.
The cast was furious when they found out. Several actors sued. The settlements were eventually paid. The films still came out. The lawsuits did not damage the work itself because Lester had already finished shooting before the dispute became public. What he had shot was already excellent. The Salkinds were terrible producers and shrewd businessmen. The films exist because they greenlit them. The films are good because Lester made them.
Richard Lester had previously directed A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and The Knack …and How to Get It. He understood comic timing at the level of physical choreography. He understood that physical comedy works best when the actors take it seriously. He understood that period costume drama becomes interesting when the characters treat the period as their actual everyday life rather than as an exhibition of historical detail. All three understandings show up in every frame of both films.
The Cast
Michael York plays D’Artagnan as the country boy he is supposed to be. The character arrives in Paris from Gascony with no money, no connections, and absurd confidence. York commits to the absurdity. He plays D’Artagnan as a young man who genuinely believes he is the equal of any musketeer he meets, even when the evidence in front of him suggests otherwise. The performance is the foundation the films build on. Every other character reacts to D’Artagnan. If the audience does not buy D’Artagnan, the films collapse. York sells him completely.
Oliver Reed plays Athos as a wounded aristocrat who drinks because he cannot face what he did to his wife. The performance is quieter than Reed’s reputation suggests. He had a public image as a hellraiser. He turned that image off for this role and played the haunted nobleman instead. The scene where Athos finally tells the story of Milady is the dramatic center of the second film. Reed delivers it without raising his voice. The discipline is the achievement.
Frank Finlay plays Porthos as exactly what Porthos is supposed to be. Loud, vain, brave, and not very bright. The vanity is what makes the character work. Porthos cares about his clothes. He cares about his reputation. He cares about being seen as the most magnificent of the four. Finlay plays the vanity straight, which makes it funny without ever becoming a joke at Porthos’s expense.
Richard Chamberlain plays Aramis as the would-be priest who keeps getting distracted by women. The combination should not work. Chamberlain makes it work by playing both halves with equal sincerity. Aramis genuinely intends to enter the church. He also genuinely cannot stop sleeping with duchesses. The contradiction is the character.
For Writers
The four musketeers each have a single defining trait that gets played at multiple registers across both films. Athos is haunted. Porthos is vain. Aramis is conflicted. D’Artagnan is reckless. The traits do not change. The situations the films put the traits into change. Athos haunted in a tavern is different from Athos haunted in a duel is different from Athos haunted facing Milady. The lesson for writers is that character consistency does not require character flatness. A single defining trait can carry a character through hundreds of pages or six hours of film if you keep finding new situations that test the trait in different ways. Dumas understood this. Fraser preserved it. Lester filmed it. The four men feel like four distinct people throughout both films because their defining traits never stop being relevant to whatever scene they are in.
Charlton Heston As Richelieu
Charlton Heston playing Cardinal Richelieu is the casting that should not work and does. Heston was an American action star with a voice trained for biblical epics. Richelieu was a French churchman whose power came from being the smartest person in any room. The mismatch on paper is severe. The performance on screen is one of Heston’s best.
Heston plays Richelieu as a man who has spent thirty years handling the politics of the French court and who finds D’Artagnan and his friends genuinely interesting because they are unpredictable. The Cardinal is not the villain. The Cardinal is the chief minister of France attempting to manage a queen with a wandering eye and a king who cannot read his own councils. The musketeers are obstacles to the Cardinal’s work. The Cardinal does not hate them. He just needs them out of the way.
The scene where Richelieu offers D’Artagnan a commission in his own guards is the centerpiece of Heston’s performance. The Cardinal recognizes talent. The Cardinal would prefer that talent work for him rather than against him. The offer is genuine. D’Artagnan turns it down out of loyalty to the musketeers. The Cardinal accepts the refusal without anger because the loyalty is exactly the quality he was recruiting. Heston plays the entire exchange without any of his usual theatrical bombast. The restraint is the performance.
Faye Dunaway As Milady
Faye Dunaway plays Milady de Winter as one of the great villains in adventure cinema. The character is supposed to be beautiful, deadly, brilliant, and damaged. Most adaptations get one or two of those four. Dunaway delivers all four at the same time. She is the reason the second film works at the level it does. The Four Musketeers is basically the Milady film. Athos is her former husband. D’Artagnan beds her under false pretenses. The Duke of Buckingham trusts her. The Queen confides in her. Constance Bonacieux dies because of her. Every major plot in the second film passes through Milady.
Dunaway plays her without softening any of the cruelty. The character poisons a young woman she has befriended. She seduces her jailer into freeing her. She orchestrates a political assassination across international borders. None of this is played for sympathy. Milady is not redeemed. Milady is not understood. Milady is simply a woman who decided long ago that she would survive whatever the world threw at her, and the methods she has developed for surviving have consequences for everyone she encounters.
The execution scene at the end of the second film is one of the harder sequences to watch in 1970s cinema. Milady is condemned. The executioner is summoned. Her former husband Athos delivers the verdict. The musketeers stand witness. Dunaway plays Milady’s final moments with the same refusal to perform innocence that she has maintained throughout. She knows what she has done. She knows what is happening to her. She does not beg. The scene is brutal because it is honest. The films do not soften the execution of a woman who has earned her execution.
The Sword Choreography
William Hobbs choreographed the fights. Hobbs is the best fight choreographer in the history of period cinema. His work on these films redefined what swordplay could look like on screen. Before Hobbs, movie sword fights were elegant exchanges of measured blows between actors trained to look balletic. Hobbs threw all of that out. His sword fights are messy, dirty, exhausting, and full of improvisation. Characters trip. Characters grab anything within reach. Characters get tired. Characters use the environment.
The tavern fight in the first film demonstrates the approach. D’Artagnan and the musketeers fight Richelieu’s guards using barrels, ladders, hanging meat, water troughs, and at one point a live chicken. The combatants do not stand in elegant en garde positions. They move, they push, they grab, they fall. The fight runs for several minutes and the audience can follow it the entire time because Hobbs choreographed it as a sequence of distinct physical actions rather than as a continuous flow of blade exchanges.
Every subsequent serious period swordfight in cinema borrows from Hobbs. Rob Roy borrows from him directly. Hobbs choreographed the final duel in Rob Roy twenty years later using the same principles. The Princess Bride borrows from him. Game of Thrones borrows from him. The whole genre operates within vocabulary Hobbs developed for these two Lester films.
For Writers
Hobbs choreographed action by treating the environment as a participant. A tavern fight is not about how the swordsmen handle their swords. A tavern fight is about how the swordsmen handle a tavern that contains barrels, ladders, hanging meat, drunk patrons, slippery floors, and tables to be flipped. The environment generates the action. The action does not generate the environment. The lesson for writers is that action sequences become memorable through specific physical detail rather than through generic combat description. If your characters are fighting, fight them in a specific place with specific objects available to them. The chicken your hero grabs and throws is more interesting than three perfectly executed blade exchanges. Specificity is the entire game.
The Comic Timing
Roy Kinnear plays Planchet, D’Artagnan’s servant. Kinnear was a Lester regular. He appeared in Help! and How I Won the War before these films. He understood that physical comedy works best when the character genuinely does not know he is being funny. Planchet is loyal, brave, terrified, hungry, and consistently in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kinnear plays him as a man trying to do his job under increasingly impossible circumstances. The performance is one of the great supporting turns in 1970s adventure cinema.
Spike Milligan plays Monsieur Bonacieux, Constance’s older husband. Milligan was a founding member of the Goon Show. He had a manic comic energy that Lester deployed strategically. Bonacieux is on screen for only a few sequences. Milligan turns each appearance into a small set piece. The character is a fool, a coward, and an idiot. Milligan plays him at maximum register without ever quite tipping into caricature.
The Buckingham sequences in London show Lester running comic timing at scale. The Duke of Buckingham, played by Simon Ward, receives Constance Bonacieux in his palace. The scene includes elaborate court protocol, multiple servants, formal introductions, and the Duke trying to maintain dignity while clearly being lovestruck by the news that the Queen has sent for him. Lester films the whole sequence with the same attention to detail he gave the Beatles films. The comedy emerges from the precision of the staging.
The Source Material
George MacDonald Fraser wrote the screenplay. Fraser was the author of the Flashman novels. He understood Dumas at a level most screenwriters cannot reach. The Flashman books are themselves adventures in the Dumas tradition with a deliberately unheroic protagonist. Fraser had spent years studying how Dumas built scenes, how Dumas paced revelations, how Dumas balanced comedy and danger. The screenplay for these two films reflects all of that study.
Fraser kept more of the novel’s plot than most adaptations attempt. The full Diamond Studs sequence is preserved. The full Milady arc is preserved. The London sequences are preserved. The political background with Richelieu, Queen Anne, and King Louis XIII is preserved. Most film adaptations of Dumas compress the novel into ninety minutes and lose half the plot. Fraser had six hours and used all of them. Nothing essential to the novel is missing.
Fraser also preserved the tonal complexity of the source. Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers as a serial for a Parisian newspaper. The book is funny, romantic, violent, political, and tragic in different chapters. Most adaptations pick the tone they prefer and cut the rest. Fraser kept all of them. The films modulate from comedy to swordplay to romance to political intrigue to torture and execution without any of the transitions feeling forced. The tonal range is the source. Fraser respected the source.
The Look
David Watkin shot both films. Watkin would later shoot Out of Africa and Chariots of Fire. His cinematography for these films established the visual vocabulary that all subsequent period adventure productions would build on. The interiors are lit with practical sources. The candles are real candles. The fires are real fires. The shadows are deep and historically accurate. Watkin avoided the bright Technicolor flat lighting that most 1960s period productions had used. He filmed seventeenth-century France as it would have actually looked to seventeenth-century French people.
The exteriors were shot largely in Spain because Spain in the early 1970s still contained landscapes and architecture that could pass for seventeenth-century France with minimal modification. The Spanish locations also kept production costs down, which the Salkinds appreciated. The visual result was a France that felt geographically real rather than studio-bound.
Michel Legrand composed the score. Legrand was the French film composer of the era. His work on these films is restrained by his standards. He composed thematic material that supports the action without ever announcing itself. The musketeers have a theme. Milady has a theme. The Cardinal has a theme. The themes return at appropriate moments without ever becoming the kind of wall-to-wall scoring that subsequent adventure films would adopt.
The Split
The decision to release the production as two films rather than one was made by the Salkinds for commercial reasons. The Three Musketeers came out in December 1973. The Four Musketeers came out in March 1975 in the US and earlier in Europe. The split worked commercially. Both films were profitable. The first film was the bigger hit, which makes sense. The first film is the introduction. The first film has the lighter tone, the Buckingham sequences, the Diamond Studs plot, and the first major swordfight set pieces. The second film is darker, more focused on Milady, and ends with an execution.
Audiences who watched both films in 1973 and 1975 experienced them as separate releases. Modern audiences should watch them back to back. That is how Lester shot them. That is how Fraser wrote them. The split into two films is a production accident. The work itself is one six-hour epic about four men who become friends in extraordinary circumstances and what happens to them when a beautiful woman with a brand on her shoulder decides she would prefer they all be dead.
For Writers
The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers demonstrate the value of taking source material seriously across its full tonal range rather than picking one register and discarding the rest. Dumas wrote a novel that is funny, romantic, violent, political, and tragic. Fraser preserved all five registers. Lester filmed all five registers. The result is two films that operate as comedy and as tragedy at different moments without any sense that the modes are competing with each other. The lesson for writers is that genre flexibility within a single work requires commitment to each genre when the work is in that mode. A funny scene should be all the way funny. A tragic scene should be all the way tragic. The transitions handle themselves if each individual scene is fully committed to whatever it is. Trying to maintain a single neutral tone throughout produces less effective work than allowing the work to be funny when it should be funny and devastating when it should be devastating.
Compared To Other Adaptations
The 1948 Gene Kelly version is a glossy MGM musical adventure that turns the material into a showcase for Kelly’s athletic dancing. It is enjoyable. It is not Dumas. The 1993 Disney version with Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, and Chris O’Donnell is a Hollywood teen adventure that misses the entire point. It is unwatchable. The 2011 Paul W.S. Anderson version with the airships and the steampunk nonsense is unwatchable in a different way. The 2023 French two-film adaptation with Eva Green as Milady is the only recent attempt to take the material seriously. The French films are good. They are not as good as Lester’s. The Lester films set a standard that subsequent productions either match or fail against. Nothing has matched them yet.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The fundamental craft achievement of these films is the casting. Lester cast every role correctly. Michael York is the only D’Artagnan that has ever worked on screen. Oliver Reed is the only Athos that has ever worked on screen. Frank Finlay is the only Porthos that has ever worked on screen. Richard Chamberlain is the only Aramis that has ever worked on screen. Charlton Heston is the only Richelieu that has ever worked on screen. Faye Dunaway is the only Milady that has ever worked on screen. Christopher Lee as Rochefort is the only Rochefort that has ever worked on screen. Raquel Welch is the only Constance that has ever worked on screen. The casting alone would make these films important. Combined with Fraser’s screenplay and Hobbs’s choreography and Watkin’s cinematography and Legrand’s score, the casting produces a film that no subsequent production has been able to equal. Casting is not a craft skill that gets discussed enough in writing instruction. Writers should think about it. The right actor in the right role is the difference between a film that works and a film that fails. Lester got every casting decision right across two films and seven major roles. That is not luck. That is craft operating at the highest level.
The Verdict
A 10+++. The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are the best adaptation of Dumas ever filmed. The casting is perfect across every major role. The screenplay preserves the full tonal range of the novel. The swordplay choreography redefined what period action could look like on screen. The cinematography established the visual vocabulary that subsequent period productions still operate within. The score supports the action without dominating it. The films work as adventure, as comedy, as romance, as political drama, and as tragedy at the same time. Most adaptations pick one of those modes. Lester ran all five.
I have watched both films many times since first seeing them as a young man. They reward every viewing. The comic timing remains sharp. The action sequences remain thrilling. The Milady arc remains devastating. The Cardinal sequences remain politically interesting. The musketeer friendship remains the emotional center the films build everything else around. The 10+++ rating reflects the aggregate achievement of a production that got every element right. Watch them back to back. Pretend the split into two films never happened. Experience the work as Lester shot it.
FAQ
Should I watch these as one film or two?
One. The films were shot as a single production and split into two releases for commercial reasons. Modern audiences should watch them back to back. The narrative is continuous. The cast is the same. The tone shifts from comic in the first film to darker in the second, but the shift is gradual and the second film depends on the first for its emotional weight. Watching them separately works. Watching them together works better.
What is the Salkind Clause?
The Screen Actors Guild rule requiring producers to specify in advance how many films will be made from a given production. The Salkinds shot The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers as one project, paid the cast for one film, and released the footage as two films. Several actors sued. The settlements were eventually paid. The rule that came out of the dispute is named after the producers who caused it.
Did Faye Dunaway win awards for Milady?
Not at the major American ceremonies. Dunaway received critical praise for the performance but was not nominated for the Oscar. Raquel Welch won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her work as Constance. Welch’s award is sometimes cited as a surprising win because the recognition went to the lighter performance rather than to Dunaway’s heavier work. Both performances deserve recognition.
How accurate is the swordplay?
William Hobbs researched seventeenth-century French fencing manuals and adapted them for cinema. The technique on screen is more historically grounded than most period swordplay before or since. The fights are not exact reproductions of period combat because exact reproductions would not work as cinema. The fights are dramatized versions of period combat that preserve the actual physical principles of seventeenth-century swordwork. The result is sword choreography that feels real because it is built on real foundations.
Why was the second film so much darker?
The second film follows the second half of Dumas’s novel, which is darker than the first half. The first half is the Diamond Studs plot with its political intrigue, comic misadventures, and grand swordfights. The second half is the Milady plot with its assassination plot, betrayals, poisonings, and executions. Lester and Fraser preserved the structure of the source. The first film is light because the first half of the book is light. The second film is dark because the second half of the book is dark.
Is Charlton Heston actually any good as Richelieu?
Yes. The casting looks wrong on paper and works on screen. Heston plays Richelieu as a competent administrator rather than as a melodramatic villain. The Cardinal in the films is a man trying to manage a difficult court, a wandering queen, and a king who cannot read his own councils. Heston brings the gravitas the role requires without the bombast he sometimes deployed in other productions. The restraint is the achievement.
What happened to Christopher Lee as Rochefort?
Lee plays the Cardinal’s enforcer with the same precision he brought to his Dracula performances. The role is supporting rather than central. Lee gets several major sequences including the opening confrontation with D’Artagnan, the duels, and the climactic chase. The performance is one of Lee’s most controlled. He understood that Rochefort is dangerous precisely because he does not need to show that he is dangerous.
How does this compare to the 2023 French version?
The French two-film adaptation directed by Martin Bourboulon is the only recent version that takes the material seriously. The 2023 films are well cast, well shot, and respectfully adapted from the source. They are not as good as Lester’s films. The 2023 versions are darker, more political, and less interested in the comic register that Lester ran so successfully. They are worth watching after Lester. They do not replace Lester.
What is the Diamond Studs plot?
Queen Anne of France has given diamond studs to the Duke of Buckingham of England as a token of her affection. King Louis XIII demands that the Queen wear the studs to an upcoming ball. The Cardinal knows the Queen does not have the studs because the Cardinal has been tracking the affair. D’Artagnan and the musketeers must travel to London, retrieve the studs from Buckingham, and return them to the Queen before the ball. The plot occupies most of the first film. The whole sequence is one of the great chase narratives in adventure cinema.
Are these films suitable for children?
The first film is suitable for older children. The second film contains an execution and several sequences of torture and poisoning that are not suitable for younger viewers. Parents should preview the second film before showing it to children. The films are not gratuitously violent by modern standards, but the violence that is present is treated seriously rather than as cartoon action. Adults watching with children should be ready to discuss what the second film shows.