The Three Musketeers (1948)

Director: George Sidney
Writer: Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas
Stars: Lana Turner, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Van Heflin, Angela Lansbury, Frank Morgan, Vincent Price, Keenan Wynn and John Sutton

Index: The First Thirty.

For a beloved family classic, there’s an awful lot wrong with this famous take on The Three Musketeers, now only the seventh result for the famous title on IMDb, but the fifteenth made at that time. However, it won me over again in the end, as it does each time. I’m embarrassed early on but it leaves me smiling by the end.

The Three Musketeers this time out—Athos, Porthos and Aramis, as always—are played by Van Heflin, Gig Young and Robert Coote, who make for a jolly lot of honourable scoundrels, Heflin in particular bringing substance to his role and not only in the sense of alcohol.

The new fish, D’Artagnan, who trawls them into a rash of adventures, is Gene Kelly, utterly sure that he’s in a musical even though writer Robert Ardrey and director George Sidney had no such ambition. He overdoes everything as a living cartoon and I never bought his comedy, but the balance and energy he has as a dancer does lend itself to magnificent swordfights.

On his first day in Paris, he manages to find his way into a duel with all three of the above musketeers on the very same day, but the first turns into a rout of Richelieu’s men, who show up to arrest them. Given a string of ambitious leaps, I wondered if he was aiming at Douglas Fairbanks Sr. more than Errol Flynn, but then I realised that his ability to turn anything into a prop meant that he was aiming at Jackie Chan, merely thirty-five years too early.

Surprisingly, Kelly doesn’t get top billing, as this is a Lana Turner film. Milady de Winter is a principal character, but this is a faithful take on the Dumas novel, so she doesn’t have much to do until the story gets moving. She’s just as beautiful, deadly and efficient as she ought to be, so she’s easily one of the biggest successes the film has to boast, even though she thought that it was as ridiculous as it truly is.

Apparently she and Vincent Price played a lot of practical jokes on each other, even after Kelly yelled at them to stop. Price, of course, is Cardinal Richelieu, Milady’s boss and the most powerful man in France, even though an MGM decision to avoid potential backlash from their substantial Roman Catholic fanbase meant the word “Cardinal” was carefully avoided.

Price is in strong villainous form here, with the crew aiding him massively. His make-up is strong, rendering him a sinister look that he’d return to in Witchfinder General. The camera is happy to look up at him too, so that he looks down on us both literally and figuratively. At one point, he sits on a throne and strokes a cat as if he’s auditioning to be a Bond villain. His men may be a joke but he certainly isn’t.

Frank Morgan is an appropriately bumbling king, Louis XIII, but he’s as inconsequential as he is fun. His wife, though we rarely see them in the same scene, is Angela Lansbury, who’s a miracle on legs, given that she always seemed to look the same, whether at twenty-three or ninety-three.

Unlike her husband, Queen Anne does drive the plot, but it’s mostly through an unwise gift of a set of twelve diamond studs to her lover, the Duke of Buckingham, who also happens to be the British Prime Minister. Knowing all that happens in France, Richelieu finds out and has Milady steal two so he can expose the Queen’s infidelity at a ball to be held in nine days time. D’Artagnan is tasked by Constance Bonacieux, one of the queen’s maids and his beloved, with getting there first.

June Allyson does a decent job as Constance, but her part is unwisely bulked up a little from the book, because pitting her against Milady is a mismatch every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Turner eats Allyson for breakfast. No wonder the second half of the story is Lady de Winter, pure and simple.

Really, though, we don’t watch this for story because it’s loose, if relatively faithful, and it’s just a means to spur characters to action. The jewels are a MacGuffin. What matters is that a barrage of swashes are buckled. There are lots of swordfights and rear projection shots, a distinct lack of blood not spoiling them much. Kelly leaps onto, off of and up pretty much all the sets he can find; there may well have been stuntmen but not for everything he does. The Technicolor is well used; this would have been a shadow of itself in black and white in more than one sense. Eventually there are muskets, appropriately for a film about musketeers, but the swordplay is far more watchable, however outrageous it happens to be.

Perhaps my biggest problem with The Three Musketeers is the presence of Gene Kelly. I have a huge amount of respect for him as a dancer, even though dancing is really not my thing. It must be said that he moved like gravity had no power over him. I’m sure he didn’t get to be as good as this without a heck of a lot of practice but he makes it look as effortless as any other dancer I’ve seen. I can happily appreciate how that makes his footwork in swordfights just as fluid and effortless.

However, he doesn’t just treat every fight as a dance routine, he treats everything else as a lesser scene in between those dance routines too, which might work in a musical like Singin’ in the Rain but not in a comedy like The Three Musketeers. Sure, this was always intended to be larger than life, but he’s larger than larger than life and it’s all too much for me.

There’s a huge amount of talent in play for this one, with the five stars and five co-stars omitting one of the titular characters, Aramis apparently not important enough to warrant a poster billing. Patricia Medina doesn’t make it up there either, even though she does a stellar job as Milady’s maid, Kitty. While it should be Kelly’s show, I’d call it Turner’s and Price’s, in that order, and Heflin’s behind them.

There’s another name I’ll throw out to sit in their company and that’s Robert Planck’s. He’s not in the film but he was responsible for how it looks and his efforts deservedly landed him an Oscar nomination for cinematography. The swordfights are great, but he manages to find moments of drama even when the actors don’t seem to want to help much. In fact, the darker the scene, more thematically but also literally, the better he gets. Scenes of Richelieu in rain during wartime are deep and shots of Milady in captivity looking out of her window during a thunderstorm are impeccably gothic.

I’m sure I’ll watch this again at some point and I’m sure that I’ll be just as embarrassed by a lot of it, but I’ll enjoy it again nonetheless.