Criterion’s anticipated 2-film collection of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers arrived on Blu-ray and 4K UHD this week.
If the swashbuckling 70s duology The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers seem extremely well put-together as a pairing, that’s not by accident. The two films were originally planned as a single film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ most famous novel, but faced with a sprawling narrative that would result in either cutting too much material or having an overly long film, was split into two more comfortable runtimes. (Salkind would go on to produce the first two Superman films together, undoubtedly influenced by the efficiency he found in accidentally doing so on Musketeers).
While popular depictions of the Musketeers often paint them with a reductively heroic brush, the filmmakers – including producer Ilya Salkind, director Richard Lester, and writer George MacDonald Fraser – drew directly from the novel, with its rapscallious protagonists, adult themes of scandal and infidelity, and political power struggles between royalty and religion.
The films’ casts are stacked with significant start power, with as much or more attention on the antagonists as the musketeers and their friends. The films employ swashbuckling action, lavish design, and surprisingly heavy dose of comedy and even outright slapstick for a saucy and amusing result.
The Three Musketeers
Young D’Artagnan (Michael York) leaves his rural home with the goal of joining the King’s elite guard, known as the Musketeers. His unrefined rural ways and youthful passions tend to make him a fish out of water and land him in trouble, but also imbue him a certain vitality that makes him an interesting protagonist as he navigates a new world fraught with villains, scandals, espionage, and dirty, high-stakes politics.
D’Artagnan befriends a trio of Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain), and becomes infatuated with his landlord’s beautiful wife Constance (Raquel Welch), who serves the Queen (Geraldine Chaplin) as a seamstress but also her most trusted confidante.
In the affairs of state, a power struggle is ongoing between the King (Jean-Pierre Cassell) and the Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston), which filters down to their respective guards, who carry an ongoing enmity.
A plot by the Cardinal to reveal the queen’s affair with the Duke of Buckingham prompts Constance and D’Artagnan to save her honor, sending the young man and his three new Musketeer friends on a perilous race across France and England, contending against the Cardinal’s own heavies, the Comte de Rochefort (Christopher Lee), the fearsome captain of his Guard, and the beautiful but deadly spy Milady (Faye Dunaway).
The Four Musketeers
After successfully foiling the Cardinal’s plans and saving the Queen’s honor, D’Artagnan achieves his goal of becoming a Musketeer. But his path is beset by new challenges as he is now fully entrenched in this new world: the disappearance of Constance, an affair with Milady, and a growing personal rivalry with Rochefort.
While the film carries on the fun and freewheeling tone of the first film, it’s also a darker chapter. We learn from Athos of his secret and tragic past. D’Artagnan maintains that he loves Constance (despite her being married), but in her absence after an apparently kidnapping, readily avails himself to bed other women. And the tale’s end isn’t en entirely happy one – some of the tale’s twists and turns may surprise viewers who aren’t already familiar with the story.
Together, the pair of films do a pretty marvelous job of capturing the essence and narrative of the lengthy novel.
The Package
The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers duology arrive as a single collected edition from Criterion Collection. (The later 1989 sequel, Return of the Musketeers, is not included), available as a 2-Disc Blu-ray edition (each film and its features to its own disc), and a 4-disc UHD edition which includes additional 4K versions.
Included is a 12-page folded folded booklet with an essay by Stephanie Zacharek and a whimsical 3-panel illustration by Mattias Adolfsson, similar in style to Where’s Waldo.
The 4K version of the package comes in a transparent clamshell case similar to the usual Criterion case, but thicker (almost twice the thickness of a standard blue case). This case design doesn’t have the usual tabs for inserts due to its raised trays, so the booklet just sits loose in the middle when the case is closed (and might fall out when opening the case if unanticipated).
This new Criterion edition features three generations of supplementary features, each more detailed than the last: a short BTS from 1973, a more substantial one from the DVD era, and finally a sprawling multipart documentary new to this edition.
These weigh in pretty heavily at over 3 hours, and are almost as much fun to watch as the films, which each era capturing a different historical, critical, and production perspectives.
Special Features on The Three Musketeers
- Two For One
- Pre-Production (29:54)
- Principal Photography (43:03)
This new documentary by David Cairns is a substantial revisit to the creation of the films, approaching the material as a production narrative. The format is heavily illustrated with clips and images, and primarily narrated as a history rather than a series of interviews, only occasionally pulling in other audio clips or interview segments, most notably and consistently from Executive in Charge of Production Pierre Spengler.
- Saga of the Musketeers, Part 1 (23:03)
This 2002 DVD feature is a more traditional and completely interview-driven telling, with one major advantage over the newer doc: many of the cast were still alive at the time, and there are on-camera interviews with Michael York as well as a lineup of legends (Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Frank Finlay) who are no longer with us. On the production side, the narrative is framed around Executive Producer Ilya Salkind, along with Spengler.
- The Making of “The Three Musketeers” (6:50)
This breezy 1973 presskit-style BTS doc isn’t as substantial as the modern ones in terms of any meaningful narrative, but has the notable distinction of being shot on location – a chance to visit the set.
- The Three Musketeers Trailer (3:01)
Special Features on The Four Musketeers
- Two For One
- Principal Photography, Part 2 (42:07)
- Post-Production (26:06)
- Saga of the Musketeers, Part 2 (24:53)
- The Four Musketeers Trailer (2:51)
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The Three Musketeers & The Four Musketeers – Criterion 4K UHD | Criterion Blu-ray
