Richard Lester’s superb epic succeeds in every way — with a glorious production, dazzling swordplay, witty comedy, and fidelity to the spirit of the Dumas novel. It’s a showcase for a wonderful cast, and is probably the best movie of both Oliver Reed and Raquel Welch. Criterion’s massive box includes a feature-length, 4-part making-of tale that’s the most engaging piece of its kind we’ve yet seen — two solid hours of fascinating behind-the-scenes stories.

The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers: Two Films by Richard Lester
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1263
1973 + 1974 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 107 + 106 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 27, 2025 / 39.95
Starring: Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Christopher Lee, Geraldine Chaplin, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Georges Wilson, Simon Ward, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Joss Ackland, Nicole Calfan, Michael Gothard, Sybil Danning, Gitty Djamal, Ángel del Pozo, Francis De Wolff, Jack Watson, Michael Hordern (voice)
Cinematography: David Watkin
Production Designer: Brian Eatwell
Art Directors: Lesl Dilley, Fernando González
Film Editor: John Victor Smith
Costume Design: Yvonne Blake
Fight Director: William Hobbs
Composers: Michel Legrand / Lalo Schifrin
Screenplay Written by George MacDonald Fraser from the novel by Alexander Dumas
Produced by Alexander Salkind, Michael Salkind
Directed by Richard Lester

The early 1970s became known for the Directors’ Cinema of the ‘New Hollywood.’  The decline of the studios had put a damper on grandiose filmmaking. David Lean’s latest  70mm epic hadn’t done well, and MGM had cancelled  an enormous Fred Zinnemann production just days before shooting was to start.

The golden age for experimentation by directors like Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson & Hal Ashby, also represented a lean period for escapist entertainment. Family shows could be really bland. The grim The Panic in Needle Park attracted the critical press, but the masses preferred fare like  The Sting. Far more people saw  The Towering Inferno than  The Godfather Part 2.

Spielberg and Lucas would eventually remind America how to once again line up at the box office, for movie-movies that didn’t have a Paul Newman or a Steve McQueen. But in the meantime a big-scale ’70s picture might be something like  Papillon, a bloated vehicle for a pair of big stars.

There are exceptions to be sure, and one of the happiest special cases was Richard Lester’s two-film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. It’s exceptional right from the choice of subject matter — in 1972, who would have thought the world needed another Musketeers movie?  The silent Douglas Fairbanks classic was mostly lost to time, and the  1948 MGM picture was not remembered as a winner.

These big-scale action comedy epics are even more exceptional: they’re a rare project in which everything went right. Criterion’s handsome 4K / Blu-ray set The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers: Two Films by Richard Lester delivers picture-perfect encodings plus an ambitious added-value extra that tells the full story of big-scale moviemaking serendipity.

The producers were the ‘notorious’ Salkinds: Alexander, Michael and Illya. Grandfather Michael had produced classics with G.W. Pabst, but their recent track record did not put them in the same company with independents Joseph E. Levine or Carlo Ponti. spotty at best. Their Kirk Douglas movie  The Light at the Edge of the World was an average performer. Their best known picture, Orson Welles’  The Trial, was still mired in lawsuits ten years after release.

‘Everything went right’ is an understatement. The Salkinds contracted the highly creative director Richard Lester, whose bright and playful  Beatles films and  The Knack… had established a new film style for Mod England. George MacDonald Fraser’s screenplay honors the original tale, yet opens up the story to accommodate Lester’s flair for inventive comedy.

1973 was a key year for movies about fancy screen fighting, what with the huge success of the Bruce Lee film  Enter the Dragon. Director Lester updated the swashbuckling heritage of Errol Flynn and company, by choreographing elaborate swordfights as comic highlights.

The Salkinds’ financial magic / chicanery / who knows? managed a lavish production filmed mostly in Spain, where giant palaces and cathedrals impersonate French palaces and cathedrals. An ideal cast was rounded up. The Salkinds capped their achievement by pulling off the cleverest production maneuver of the decade. Only at the film’s premiere did its stars find out that the movie they signed on for, would actually become two separate movies released 8 months apart.

The movies’ 213 combined minutes give the Dumas tale plenty of room to breathe. Young D’Artagnan (Michael York) comes to Paris hoping to join the elite Musketeers of King Louis XIII (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and falls in with the roguish Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain). Their adventures center around the extramarital hijinks of the Queen, Anna of Austria (Geraldine Chaplin). Bored by her silly husband, the Queen has become infatuated with the Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), an Englishman and technically an enemy.

The real power behind the throne is Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston), a Machiavellian schemer who employs his dastardly agents Rochefort (Christopher Lee) and Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) in a shady effort to discredit Louis, as war threatens between Catholic France and Protestant rebels backed by England. For D’Artagnan’s part, his heart is taken by the Queen’s dressmaker, Constance de Bonancieux (Raquel Welch). She’s married to the bumbling Monsieur Bonacieux (Spike Milligan). Richelieu soon discovers that Constance forms a link between the Queen and our heroic Musketeers, who will do anything to preserve the honor and dignity of the King.

The main conflict in the first feature, later amended with the title The Queen’s Jewels, sees D’Artagnan and the Musketeers racing to recover a set of diamonds from Lord Buckingham in England; Cardinal Richelieu has dispatched the seductive Milady to insure that Queen Anna is publicly compromised with a charge of infidelity.

The second film has an official title amendment: The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge. The narrative energy doesn’t flag, and the comical swordfights continue, but the storyline retains the darker aspects of the Dumas original. The often cartoonish goings-on become deadly serious.

Unlike earlier epics, the Salkinds’ big-scale Musketeer pictures did not spin out of control in matters of  finance or  logistics. The Salkinds’ later  Superman franchise became a bigger moneymaker, but for outright quality the Musketeer films can’t be topped.

With the British film industry in the pits, a bounty of name talent was hungry for prestigious parts. Director Richard Lester was given a free rein with almost all of the casting, something unheard of at this level of production. He found appropriate talent to fill the many roles. The show has a spirited ensemble feel instead of becoming any particular actor’s vehicle. Most had risen in supporting roles in big pictures, and leads in smaller ones; there are no Oliviers or Julie Christies here, just solid performers like Frank Finlay and Michael York. We’re told that Lester signed up Charlton Heston early on … with Heston on the books, other actors could feel safe that they weren’t enlisting for something cheap or shabby.

Lester’s cast is compatible, harmonious. Handsome Michael York shows himself fully capable of carrying the nominal lead role, the not-too-bright but dashing hero D’Artagnan. As the rough, alcoholic Athos, Oliver Reed suitably sulks and plays coy. Richard Chamberlain’s pretty boy Aramis fusses a bit, but handles the quips and the swordplay with finesse. The under-appreciated Frank Finlay ( The Pianist) is a comic delight as Porthos, the Musketeer trying to hide an expanding waistline.

Simon Ward, after his disappointing  Young Winston, gets good exposure as the jaunty Lord Buckingham. His stellar career finally subsiding, the epic veteran Charlton Heston was available for a plum part, which he embraces like a trouper. The same probably applies to Faye Dunaway, whose stock would soon rise, with this picture and  Chinatown.

The only star imposed on Richard Lester was Raquel Welch. She had managed herself into a top stellar bracket despite not having made many exemplary pictures, and made diva-ish demands on the production. Yet Welch ingratiated herself with her fellow cast members and proved fully capable of underplaying a good line of farce for the romantic lead Constance. She makes the comic cliché of the ‘Sexy Klutz’ work well, which is no mean feat. The Three Musketeers may be Raquel Welch’s best all-round movie.

This show has some of the best acting work from several of its stars. Genre favorite Christopher Lee was at the time still a marginalized horror star, not a major player on the industry radar. He’d only recently broken the barrier into top pictures, thanks to Billy Wilder and  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

A special favorite in the picture is D’Artagnan’s sidekick Planchet, played by another Richard Lester associate, Roy Kinnear. A blinkered choice would have been Benny Hill, whose TV persona would have thrown the picture off balance. Kinnear is near-sublime as a cheerful lacky; he and Spike Milligan underplay their characters’ humbling social position. Lester also found room for the interesting actor Michael Gothard. As Buckingham’s aide Felton, Gothard is yet another astute choice, instead of a commercial one.

Taking the Musketeers project well in hand is director Richard Lester, a funny man who nevertheless took his work seriously. A big enough heavyweight to keep the big personalities under control, Lester’s knack for action and silly slapstick finds expression in setpieces that far outpace the movies of then- reigning comedy king Blake Edwards. Lester’s work has the spirit of silent comedy nirvana, if not quite the formal beauty. The lighthearted action has an improvised looseness (thoroughly rehearsed looseness, no doubt). The villains maintain an appropriate archness to their skulduggery .. even the humorless Chris Lee has plenty of opportunities to be subtle, and manages a joke or two.

Lester’s Musketeers movies are distinguished from earlier versions by a low-key approach to the bond between the four heroes. The ‘all for one, one for all’ ethos is a natural sentiment, not a solemn oath. The four sometimes make fun of their own chivalric code. Thus the egotism, the feigned insults and jovial callousness inside this pack of virtuous scoundrels.

The production design paints a fanciful picture of Royalist France. There must be hundreds of believably ornate period costumes, including dozens of soldiers and costume party guests. We see large-scale assemblies at the palaces, and clever details on the bustling streets. Paris is shabby & dirty, and the fights and rendezvous points are often placed in inns, laundries, and the like – places where the locals are quite convincingly going about their business.

Each scene invents crazy visual details. There’s a sense of humor to everything, from the  Crimson Pirate– like proto-submarine demonstrated for Buckingham, to the restoration-era pinball games, to the herd of sheep that finds itself in the middle of a pitched battle. For a royal chess game, the chess pieces are played by dogs. A group of red New England Indians plays games in the halls of a London palace. Milady’s corset contains a hidden compartment for a dagger; at one point she threatens D’Artagnan with a glass-bladed stiletto filled with acid.

Sheer comic invention prevents the many swordfights from becoming too repetitive. Lester and his stunt choreographer manage a different approach to every duel and sword brawl. Filmed with mulitple cameras to maintain a dizzy continuity, they are truly exiting — it looks like people should be getting hurt in every shot.

All of this is capped by appropriately regal music, which in the first film is credited to Michel Legrand, and the second, Lalo Shifrin. It’s almost the only credit that doesn’t carry over to the second film … we learn that composer Legrand came up with his entire music score in just ten days.

Which brings us to the Salkinds’ cleverest bit of producing chicanery. The Three Musketeers was scripted and filmed as one enormous movie, but in post-production was divided into two features to be released 8 months apart. Only years later would more multi-episode epics be produced. The obvious example is the gargantuan  Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). Back in 1973 the brouhaha over the Salkinds’ flippant decision to split their show into two features was big news.

Lester and the Salkinds were actually reviving a format from the distant past … film Duologies (or Dyptychs?) had been championed by UfA’s Erich Pommer for silent epics by Fritz Lang, like  Die Nibelungen. Lang’s  Metropolis shows evidence that it was originally intended to be a super-epic in two separate parts. When Lang made his  Indian Films in 1959, he reverted to the same format of a two-movie miniseries. Nowadays with streaming, people are accustomed to plenty of limited series lasting 6 or 10 hours.

The Three Musketeers became a Duology in a very slippery way. The stars and other above-the-line contributors were not amused to learn that after being paid for a single Roadshow attraction, their work was going to be spread across two separate releases. What’s more, according to writer-narrator David Cairns, most of the film’s talent learned of this only at the movie’s premiere. With the story only half-told, a text card at the fade-out announced  ‘Coming Soon! THE FOUR MUSKETEERS: Milady’s Revenge.”

The talent with the most to gain sued first, even though none would have had a contract with specific text addressing the subject. But Cairns reports that the Salkinds knew what they were doing. Whenever they mentioned Musketeers in text, they called it ‘the project,’ not ‘the movie’ …. as in ‘one movie and not two.”

The story plays well in two parts. Most of the characters continue to the second film, where Faye Dunaway’s Miladay has a much bigger presence. The meet ‘n’ greet fun of The Queen’s Jewels finds a different tone in Milady’s Revenge, giving way to more serious plot developments. The only killings in part one had been in the comic sword brawls, but the mood darkens with the surprise death of a beloved character or two.

The scandal of the Salkinds splitting one movie into two made big news, promoting the movie in a way that makes us think that the ‘surprise at the premiere’ was planned all along. The two pictures now play together beautfully, as two features with an intermission.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers: Two Films by Richard Lester is a new 4K digital restoration. 20th Century Fox originally released the films theatrically but they’re now handled by StudioCanal. The 4K images are bright and colorful. David Watkin goes for natural lighting yet the scenes pop with color and variety. The cluttered exteriors read well; we appreciate the parade of elaborate designs and colorful costumes in the interior scenes.

The 4K edition contains a 4K disc for each movie, and a Blu-ray feature copy that also carries the video extras.

Criterion’s extras are long-form documentarie. A 1973 featurette stresses on-the-set footage. 2003 brings a two-part retrospective documentary by David Gregory, featuring unique interviews with cast members Raquel Welch, Michael York, Frank Finlay and Christopher Lee. All give hearty eulogies to Oliver Reed. Raquel proudly explains how her lawyers were the first to pounce on the Salkinds when one feature suddenly became two.

The elaborate new video extra at first sounds like a case of overkill. Filmmaker, critic and academic David Cairns’ interview documentary is in four parts that add up to over two hours of running time. Cairns has the close cooperation of director Lester, who comes across as quite a creative powerhouse. The surprise is that we’re not bored for a second, as there seem to be a million stories to tell about this show.

We’ve read many accounts of movie disasters — of bad casting, location problems, ego clashes and fights over money and politics.  studios forever battle with directors, ore  waste and corruption reigns. That makes it all the more impressive to see Richard Lester’s giant undertaking come off so well.

‘It’s all true’ seems to be the name of the game. Charlton Heston is described as a pro not fully invested in his role. A supposed tiff between Faye Dunaway and Raquel Welch never happened. As for Ms. Welch, her demands on the production did prejudice the cast against her, until she arrived and charmed everybody with her cooperative and helpful attitude.

The ‘problems’ described by Cairns weren’t too problematic. The scheduling of all those busy actors was worked out, sometimes using stand-ins for players not present. Welch insisted that her costumes be fashioned by her personal designer — who seems to have copied photos of Lana Turner as Constance. It works out anyway, creating a wardrobe contrast between poor girl Constance and the elegant Milady. Wild man Oliver Reed loved the movie. After nights spent drinking he somehow showed up each morning sober and prepared. The swordfights often used sharp blades, which made Reed a menace because he wasn’t keen on rehearsals. The same fencer played several of Athos’s opponents, because Reed was unpredictable and none of the other stuntmen wanted to risk being stabbed.

The location manager had to switch from Hungary to Spain on short notice. He lined up scores of scattered filming sites in record time, winning full cooperation from the Spaniards. The Salkinds somehow kept the money flowing. They kept the peace with their filmmakers, even after pulling off their two-films-for-one surprise. Given little producer interference, Richard Lester consistently brought each scene in under schedule.

This disc proves that Blu-ray extras, commentaries and ‘visual essays’ provide a real service to film culture. When a serious commentator talks about a movie worth knowing more about, disc extras have genuine value. The hard content in David Cairns’ longform piece is enought to fill an entire book, but few film books make economic sense for publishers. In this format we get to see Richard Lester talking; all that’s missing are subtitles for the hearing impaired.

It’s not covered in this release, but our thoughts leapt four years forward to the similar situation of the Salkinds’  Superman: The Movie. It was planned as two separate films from the get-go, but the production of the second film  Superman II did not go a smoothly. Marlon Brando (of course) didn’t cooperate, and something went wrong between the producers and director Richard Donner. Richard Lester replaced Donner, and unfortunately skewed the first sequel in a more comic direction. Character-defeating tomfoolery from writer Tom Mankiewicz didn’t help either. The tragedy there is that the 2006 attempt to restore a Richard Donner cut drops Superman II’s inspiring finale, a sentimental salute to the American flag and the values it represents (in our dreams, these days).

Richard Lester’s Musketeers films return the notion of FUN to the costume epic. The jokey entertainments connect with the joy of the director’s 1959 short subject  The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. His Musketeers films don’t stay still for a second while upholding spirit of the Dumas original. Lester’s comic sensibility keeps twenty vivid, entertaining characters in motion at all times.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Three Musketeers / The Four Musketeers: Two Films by Richard Lester
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movies: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Two for One, a new 4-part feature documentary by critic David Cairns
The Saga of the Musketeers (2002), a two-part documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew members
The Making of “The Three Musketeers,” a 1973 featurette with behind-the-scenes footage of director Richard Lester
Trailers
Insert () with an essay by Stephanie Zacharek.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 7, 2025
(7324musk)

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