Historical Farce

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FOUR MUSKETEERS

Directed by RICHARD LESTER

Screenplay by

GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

Movies are the most accidental of arts, and we are lucky if we can walk away from many of them with minor brain damage. Very occasionally, however, the accidents are lucky ones. For example, when Richard Lester and friends got to making a new version of The Three Musketeers a couple of years back, they quickly realized that someone had blundered. There was too much script, and Lester himself had too many funny ideas to be contained in a single movie of less than Gone With the Wind proportions. Here shrewd calculation entered. The producers chopped the thing in two, and we are now presented with a new film that is not so much a sequel to last year's delightful hit as a logical extension of it.

ley Duels. Logic -- or perhaps clear thinking is the better phrase -- is the key to the success of both pictures. One does not want to bear down too heavily on the point lest the fun go out of the watching; but the reason both films work so well is that Lester is satirizing not merely that outdated movie form, the heavily romanticized historical spectacle, but history itself. When Lester's people fall off horses or into mud puddles, scramble about trying to have a picnic on a battlement, or try to duel on an icy river where they cannot even stand up, the reason is not that the director finds pratfalls irresistible. Instead, each and every character is a zealot, convinced not only that whatever cause he happens to be serving will change the course of human affairs for the better but that he is absolutely vital to that cause's success. The musketeers (Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay), for example, never stop for a moment to observe -- as Lester does -- that the French king (Jean Pierre Cassel) for whom they endlessly risk life and limb is a vain and idle popinjay. Their opponents, the servants of Cardinal Richelieu, never seem to notice that their man (deftly played by Charlton Heston) does not seem to be scheming for any useful purpose: his nature simply demands that he spend a certain number of hours each day weaving complicated plots.

Lester, in fact, is at his very best when he is undercutting the solemn -- and often inhuman -- pomposities of power on display. This movie's first sequence, for example, shows the musketeers' efforts to rescue a spy from a firing squad, greatly assisted by the fact that a) it requires something like five minutes to load and aim a matchlock gun and b) using this very latest thing in weaponry, an entire squad of men is likely to miss a stationary target not ten paces away. A little later the French monarch and his retinue pause on their way to a siege for a little lunch in the fields. A portable calliope plays a jolly tune while in the background, unheeded by all, the Cardinal's men hang traitors from a picturesque tree.

None of this means that the film is less cheeky (or less visually sumptuous) than its predecessor. It is merely a modest claim that its director is something more than a nimble comic stylist. He has the good satirist's indispensable quality, moral indignation, and the wit to show it only in bright, bitter, almost subliminal flashes. Perforce less of a surprise than The Three Musketeers, and perhaps a little sketchier in plotting and characterization. The Four Musketeers disappoints only because we know that there is not enough film left in the can to bring D'Artagnan and the rest back just One more time.

-- Richard Schickel

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