|
The subtitle of feminine vengeance points up the kinship with Lang's Die Nibelungen. Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) is the driving force, a glass dagger full of green poison lurks under her lace, "I have affairs to be settled." Her personal mission overlaps with the machinations of Richelieu (Charlton Heston), in the background unfurls a clash of kingdoms. (A doddering cleric blesses a line of battlefield cannons in a Franju touch, "what do you think religious wars are all about?") D'Artagnan (Michael York) is the target of the villainess' fury, though Athos (Oliver Reed) is the one with a shared past—Reed's recollection of the musketeer's doomed romance with the branded beauty reveals the hirsute bruiser's aching melancholy, "a love story to cure you of love." The somber half of Richard Lester's epic swashbuckler, a growing gravity amid the prevalent jocularity. Gags often sport a grim edge, from Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) making the Sign of the Cross over a freshly slain opponent to silhouetted hangings in a floral field during one of the calliope-scored outings of the Queen (Geraldine Chaplin). (Christopher Lee's Rochefort faces a maladroit firing squad with a sigh of droll pique: "Why bother? I might die of old age.") Cricket is played with baguette and grenade and a blood-reddened bathtub dissolves to a 17th-century submarine, the Lester surrealism in spades, Porthos (Frank Finlay) holds up a bottle to be uncorked by a stray bullet during the La Rochelle siege. "Damn that pot-bellied pirate! This isn't champagne!" Contrasting duels encapsulate the progression, one whimsical on a slippery frozen lake and the other ferocious and draining after the fate of Constance (Raquel Welch). The broken sword and the executioner's boat, a kangaroo court among "the fine arts a young gentleman ought to know." Despite the official reunion a decade and a half later, Robin and Marian remains the true third installment. Cinematography by David Watkin. With Jean-Pierre Cassel, Roy Kinnear, Simon Ward, Michael Gothard, Sybil Danning, and Nicole Calfan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |