Alexandre Dumas’ rip-roaring adventure novel, “The Three Musketeers,” a bestseller since its original publication in 1844, has been turned into a movie time and again since the days of silent films.
Of all these ventures for the screen, only one remains memorable – that of Richard Lester shot in the mid-’70s, and scripted by George MacDonald, author of the celebrated Flash series and a man who knows his history. Lester caught the look of the 17th century down to the tiniest detail, filled the cast with a fine bunch of actors, managed to stay amazingly close to Dumas’ actual story line and made a pot of money while doing it.
If I’m recollecting Lester’s Musketeers with such pleasure and admiration, it’s because I just came out of a screening of the latest version of Dumas’ classic, which opened yesterday. The story has virtually nothing to do with the original except for the hero being named D’Artagnan, played incidentally by one Justin Chambers, whose prime claim seems to have been a model for Calvin Klein’s cologne. He’s a pretty thing but hardly the stuff of a musketeer.
The celebrated trio of Athos, Porthos and Aramis are scarcely more than walk-ons, played by actors in their 40s when, of course, they were all in their 20s. Director Peter Hyams and screenwriter Gene Quintano simply threw both Dumas and French history out the window.
There’s no wicked Milady de Winter, a major figure in the novel. No rescue of the queen’s diamonds from England by D’Artagnan, no siege of La Rochelle – a very real historic event and key to the novel. The Duke of Buckingham is played by some actor well past 50, instead of being “the handsomest man in England,” and desperately in love with the Queen of France, also in her 20s. And D’Artagnan’s valet Planchet is turned into an aged mentor, heaven help us.
Now, Catherine Deneuve is still a very handsome woman, but can scarcely play a 20-year old. Ah, yes, then there’s the evil wicked villain, one Fabre played by Tim Roth, done up in black leather and leaping so often into a saddle on a galloping horse you’d think he’s still playing that chimp general from “Planet of the Apes” – there’s no such character anywhere in the novel, and he’s supposed to be so wicked even Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful figure in early 17th-century France, has no control over him.
Compounding the silliness of the enterprise, wicked Fabre, wanting to bring pressure on the queen, asks if she has any children. No, she replies. Hey, fellas, if Queen Anne had no children, who was the mother of Louis XIV then? (And since the actress is well past menopause, it doesn’t seem likely she’s going to bear the heir to the throne sometime later in the film.)
Now, maybe if you’re an 8- or 10-year-old boy who goes for fancy swordplay upside down on ladders, turning somersaults sword-in-hand, you may get a charge from watching the stunt work. The Hong Kong choreographer Xin-Xin Xiong doubles for Tim Roth and performs prodigies of inventive movements. But since you really can’t care about the characters, it’s pretty much like watching a documentary on stunt work in costume.
Leave fighting suspended by wires to the likes of “The Matrix” or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and go out to the nearest Blockbuster and rent Richard Lester’s “Three Musketeers.” I guarantee you’ll have a much better evening.
The last word I’ll give to Dumas, known to play a touch fast-and-loose with history himself: “If you rape History, be sure the children of the union are beautiful.” A piece of advice Peter Hyams and his crew did not heed.
