Word: lester
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...THREE MUSKETEERS Directed by RICHARD LESTER Screenplay by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER...
...skill and high humor. A translation of Dumas' story, even a fairly respectful one, it is simultaneously a satire, sometimes antic, sometimes serious, a send-up of the whole tradition of romantic fiction. Such an accomplishment seems paradoxical, but the movie successfully cuts both ways, largely because Richard Lester is a film maker who specializes in standing paradox...
...special joy is that this is Lester's first film since the wizardly but little-seen Bed Sitting Room, which played in the U.S. in 1969 for approximately the time it would take to soft-boil an egg. Lester made his reputation from his two gymnastic Beatles movies, but his later work (most notably How I Won the War and Petulia) disclosed a deeper, even more enterprising talent-one tempered by a pointed satiric force. The Three Musketeers is not so astringent; it is ebullient, full of roughhouse, and careens along on its own high spirits...
...Lester has taken the tone of The Three Musketeers from Scenarist Fraser, whose Flashman novels Lester once tried to adapt. The Fraser books are full of the kind of self-deflating braggadocio, the same sort of elaborate but inglorious combats one finds here. Heroics are mocked, survival is championed. The musketeers are made into creatures whose absurdities of conduct, florid codes of honor and hollow protestations of heroism make them all the more recognizable and human. It is their own faint absurdity that makes them true...
...musketeers-Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Michael York as D'Artagnan-all perform admirably. When the casting threatens to become too capricious (Raquel Welch as the Queen's confidante, Faye Dunaway as the archvillainess, Charlton Heston as Richelieu), Lester exploits the absurdity. He made the discovery, for example, that Welch and Dunaway, for all their physical dissimilarity, are basically the same actress. So a climactic brawl between them is funny not just for itself but because of the two people playing them...