The Three Musketeers

The Dancing Cavalier

The Three Musketeers
USA 1948 Directed by George Sidney
MGM Spain Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Spoilers for all and all for spoilers.

I’ve been revisiting some of the Musketeer films of late and this 1948 Hollywood version of The Three Musketeers is something I’ve been wanting to get back to for a long time. It’s not available in either the UK or US on Blu Ray it seems, so I just got the inexpensive but no less wonderful looking Spanish version, which is multiregion and has both the English language version and English subtitles, should you want them. However, it appears I’ve misremembered this film and done it something of an injustice in my appraisal of it over the years. I was in my teens the last time I saw this version and remembered it somehow as being an adaptation which strayed far from the Alexandre Dumas source, Hollywood Happy Ending and all! As it turns out, now I’ve caught up with it again, nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s actually quite dark towards the end and really is probably the closest movie version I’ve seen to the source.

Clocking in with a two hours and five minutes running time, which was quite a long film for this period of American cinema, it doesn’t just do the first part of the novel, aka The Queen’s Jewels, as pretty much all future US versions did... nope, it goes the whole hog and does everything, more or less. Which is to be applauded (I didn’t remember the film being this long either). So while I remembered Constance and Milady both surviving so the heroes could live happily ever after... it was a false memory... they both die as they do in the novel and then the film goes on even a little more, with a final swordfight brawl in a tavern before the musketeers are brought before the king and Richelieu to answer for the consequences of their actions.

The film is an absolutely star stuffed vehicle too. Here’s a breakdown of the most significant cast... we have song and dance man Gene Kelly playing D’Artagnan, Van Heflin as Athos, Gig Young as Porthos and Robert Coote as Aramis. Above Kelly’s name for top billing for the film we have Lana Turner as Lady de Winter (aka Milady... or My Lady as everyone in this one keeps saying).Then there’s the always wonderful June Allyson as Constance, handmaiden to the Queen of France, as played by the young Angela Lansbury (who also wanted to play Milady but was denied that opportunity). Her husband, King Louis XIII is played by Frank Morgan (The Wizard Of Oz himself), Keenan Wynn is Planchet and lastly, but by no means least, we have the formidable Vincent Price playing Richelieu.

And as both an exciting swashbuckler and fairly faithful adaptation (for once), it’s a humdinger of a movie. I really enjoyed this version and the set piece duels are pretty amazing (the big battles are mostly left untouched and represented by montages but I suspect this film already had a large budget). The music score by Herbert Stothart...  and, ahem, Tchaikovsky... is very much Mickey Mousing it throughout, as you would expect from a large budget, MGM film of the time (even though this is not a musical)... even using comical sounds produced by the orchestra to comment on D’Artagnan’s first, bizarre looking horse, representing the whinnies of his steed. As for that Tchaikovsky... it’s the same love theme used for Flash and Dale in the first Flash Gordon serial from Universal (reviewed by me here). The colours on this thing are also very striking, using the bright hues that MGM used to favour in the 40s and 50s.

Some notes on some of the casting... well Gene Kelly is using, to be polite, some very broad acting skills, perhaps more suited to those musicals but, it’s entertaining and, boy, is he athletic in this. His dancing skills really come to the fore when he’s swashing his buckle in those sword fighting scenes and the stunts, many of which might have been performed by him (by the looks of it), are amazing. Also, his sword fighting seems to be much more confident and very fast compared to the other musketeers. He maybe looks a little older than D’Artagnan should be at this age but, the trade off is he certainly looks like he could do all that fighting himself.

Van Heflin is a bit of a revelation to me in this. Not only a very entertaining turn in the lighter parts, he perfectly conveys the authority of Athos but, also, in those dark recollections of his about his former life with the one who I will not name for fear of spoiling it for ‘musketeer virgins’, he really manages to capture a man’s struggle with darkness really well.

As for Lana Turner, well she didn’t want to be in the film and was suspended by the studio for a while for initially refusing. June Allyson also didn’t really want to be in this but I guess she put up less resistance. Either way, both acquit themselves admirably here.

The film is also a little more violent than I was expecting (other than all those bloodless, under-the-far-arm stabbings of course). For instance, although we do not see Milady stab Constance the mortal blow, we see her hand covered in her victim’s blood later... not a common sight for a movie of that time, I’m sure. Also, although it’s again bloodless, when D’Artagnan kills one of the Cardinal’s men (although not referred to as such, all traces of the catholic church having been expunged in this version in order to offend no one), he impales him on a set of antlers on the tavern wall near the end... almost like a horror movie denouement.

And that’s me pretty much done on one of the most entertaining, rewarding and surprisingly more faithful than I remembered adaptations of The Three Musketeers, except to offer up one last little fact about the film. While I was watching Gene Kelly do his thing, I remarked to my mum and dad that he’s practicing for The Duelling Cavalier... which is the film within a film which he stars in for Singin’ In The Rain. The film which was then ‘fixed’ in the plot of that movie to become The Dancing Cavalier. Well, I was closer to the truth than I knew because, it turns out that some of the footage from this movie was indeed interpolated into The Duelling Cavalier footage in Singing’ In The Rain. So next time I watch that absolute classic, I’ll keep a look out and see if I can spot it. Meanwhile, if you like your musketeer movies, definitely give this one a go.