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Three Great Flaws in Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers Films (and Most Other Adaptations Too)
3 min readFeb 9, 2023
- The No Spoilers Quick Take:
- Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers is ultimately not a romp or a comedy or a swashbuckler or a fun adventure story or any of the many things it’s been called. It’s a coming of age story about a young man who dreams of greatness and learns the world can be cruel. Therefore, a good adaptation has hints from the beginning that the story cannot have a happily-ever-after ending.
- Constance and Milady are not simple creatures, one innocent, one evil. They are women of the court who have learned to separate love and sex. They are warped mirror images, but not in innocence—neither is innocent. They are common women who found ways to rise in a feudal society, but Constance’s choices left her able to love, and Milady’s did not.
- Athos is not just a wronged man. He is a wronged man who reacted wrongly when he learned he had been wronged. At some level he must be tormented by the knowledge that if he had been able to control his first reaction, life would have been better for himself and so many others.
- The Spoilers Take:
- Lester’s light tone is at odds with the murders of the two main women in the story. If he was determined to keep that tone, he would have done better…
