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| Fairbanks takes the high ground |
Starring Douglas Fairbanks, Léon Bary and George Siegmann
Produced by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures
Young, ambitious D'Artagnan sets off from his small town for Paris to fulfill his lifelong dream: to join the King's musketeers. Along the way, he runs afoul of Rochefort, the right hand man of the evil Cardinal Richelieu. D'Artagnan meets musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis, challenging them each to a duel, but the fight becomes a battle between the four men and the cardinal's guards.
Meanwhile, Richelieu is plotting against King Louis XIII. His plan? To retrieve a diamond buckle that the king gave to the queen, but that the queen gave to the English Duke she's in love with. If Richelieu succeeds, he'll... um...errr....
Okay, the plot of this movie makes zero sense. The king gives the queen a diamond jewel, making a point to say that it is one-of-a-kind. Impossible to reproduce. The queen immediately turns around and gives it to the duke. The cardinal witnesses this and, rather than accuse her on the spot, convinces the king to ask the queen to wear the bling to a ball a few days later. So, we get a lots of scenes of the queen wringing her hands and the Cardinal looking very self-satisfied. It also means our hero can race to England to try and retreive the bauble.
It's easy to dismiss the story as a meaningless excuse for Fairbanks to be let loose his manic energy, but the film spends a lot of time on the plot. There are a lot of scenes that exist to communicate the gravity and stakes of the situation. We see lots of symbolic chess games. We get lots of characters making bold pledges with massive flourishes of the arms. We get a lot of our villain and our damsel in distress pondering their plans and fates. We try to build tension as the cardinal's men assemble for the climax while D'Artagnan races toward the city. So, the story matters and it is nonsensical.
As for Fairbanks, he is fine here. Not great, but not bad. He shines when there are action scenes, but there aren't enough chases and battles in this movie to distract from his poor acting in the other scenes. He spends much of the movie with this completely earnest look on his face that is just painful to watch. To say nothing of the fact that he is way too old to play this part. He looks the same age as the other musketeers, if not older. That would be fine if they adapted the story to service his age, but they make a point of him being a younger man several times.
The movie works during its inventive action scenes. I like the swordfight early on between the musketeers and the cardinal's guards. D'Artagnan's one-on-dozens battle and subsequent escape over Paris' rooftops is thrilling. And the final fight between our hero and Rochefort feels like an epic precursor to Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood climax.
The standout performance here for me was Nigel De Brulier's Cardinal Richelieu. He never really does anything overtly bad, but one look at the guy and you know he's evil. You can always see the wheels turning in his head and his eyes relish the moments when he thinks he has won. I also love the Bond villain like secret door and staircase in his office.
The other notable achievement of the film is in the production design. The king's halls feel grand. Paris feels like a lived in place populated by real people, not extras. The scenes of Fairbanks following a young woman he has just saved through the nighttime streets makes the alleys look menacing and foreboding.
One last thing: the ending for this is silly and not in a good, Fairbanks-y way. The Richelieu from the previous 98 percent of the movie would never do what he does at the end. the change in character is ridiculously jarring and sets up a "hey, everything worked out" ending that is really unearned.
At the end of the day, The Three Musketeers is a movie that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a zany, comic action-adventure. It also wants to be a palace intrigue thriller. It accomplishes neither. It's overstuffed with story and characters and isn't as filled with the Fairbanks brand of boundless energy as his previous work. And that's a disappointment as I loved Fairbanks' take on Zorro.
**1/2 out of *****
Photo from DVDTalk
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