Dueling Cavaliers: Comparing The Three Musketeers Movies from 1948, 1973-1974, and 1993

This week, I watched three versions of The Three Musketeers: the classic Hollywood 1948 movie starring Gene Kelly, Richard Lester’s 1970s two-parter (The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers) starring Michael York, and Disney’s 1993 take starring Chris O’Donnell. If you only want swashbuckling, you’ll like them all. If you want something that feels like the novel, you are likely to see virtues in two of them and be appalled by the third.

Best script: The 1948 wins becomes it comes closest to conveying the book’s blend of romanticism and cynicism, though it does not come as close as I’d like. The near runner-up is the 1970s version for its faithfulness to the book’s plot. Both suffer from the Problem of Milady (see Three Great Flaws in Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers Films—and Most Other Adaptations Too), but the 1970s suffers more because Lester told his screenwriter, George MacDonald Fraser, to go for broad comedy, and while some of the Lester version is truly funny, too much of it is only silly.

Robert Ardrey’s 1948 script is not perfect—the characters are less flawed and therefore less complex than in the novel, there’s a sequence where D’Artagnan pretends to be someone else to fool Milady that could be cut, a couple of the love scenes seem overwrought, and…