The Three Musketeers (1948)'s comments

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Siskoid

There is a lot of incident in Dumas' The Three Musketeers, granted, so it becomes a real juggling act to make a movie out of the material. 1948's effort doesn't really get the juggling right, running through story beats and treading over characterization to get to the exciting parts. D'Artagnan and Athos get all the love, Porthos and Aramis are more or less lost in the shuffle. As to why Richelieu isn't a cardinal, I can only imagine some kind of Catholic league trying to rewrite literature and history here, though I'm game for Vincent Price in the role. But when we do get to the exciting parts, they sure are exciting. I wasn't sure about Gene Kelly as D'Artagnan at first - he's too old here to be playing this fresh-faced rube from the country, and his early scenes are played as slapstick - but as a swashbuckler, he's incredibly fun and acrobatic, and it's those sequences that set this adaptation apart. I can almost forgive that some of them are obviously shot in California (unless France has desert terrain I don't know about). Armed with a fine cast and stellar action scenes, this version of the story amuses and entertains, but it's a product of Hollywood, not Dumas.

3 years 10 months ago