The Three Musketeers (Walt Disney Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Wolfgang Odelka Filmproduktion GmbH, Filmfonds Wien, One for All Productions, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1993)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a quite remarkable movie from 1993, The Three Musketeers, yet another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s 1844 novel Les Trois Mousquetaires with Chris O’Donnell as D’Artagnan, Kiefer Sutherland as Athos, Oliver Platt as Porthos, and Charlie Sheen top-billed as Aramis. In fact, when I first heard of this movie I wrote it off with the thought, “Not another one.” Not only had the basic story been done several times by American studios – in 1911 by Edison, in 1916 by Thomas Ince, in 1921 with Douglas Fairbanks (a milestone in his career because it propelled him out of contemporary rom-coms and into big historical epics), in 1935 by RKO with Walter Abel, a spoof in 1939 at 20th Century-Fox with Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers, a big-budget MGM version in 1948 with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, and a 1969 TV-movie with Kenneth Welch and Christopher Walken – but the template for modern adaptations seemed to have been set by Richard Lester, who shot The Three Musketeers and the sequel The Four Musketeers back-to-back in 1973 and 1974. Lester’s films had all-star casts (Michael York, Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, and Peter Sellers’s old Goon Squad partner Spike Milligan) and took a cheekily irreverent approach to the material without descending into out-and-out camp. There were also quite a few adaptations of the story in its native France (where the earliest now-lost Three Musketeers film was made in 1903), and since the 1993 The Three Musketeers there have been many other versions as well, including a Ukrainian musical from 2004 featuring current Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky that gender-changed the Musketeers into women. Surprise: the 1993 The Three Musketeers turned out to be a quite nicely paced entertainment, capably directed by Stephen Herek from a well-constructed script by David Loughery.

I was watching this in preparation for writing a Fanfare magazine review of a two-CD set of Michael Kamen’s music for the film, and this is one movie that comes close to fulfilling Jack Warner’s demand of his music director, Ray Heindorf, that the music start when the opening studio logo came on screen and not stop until “The End” credit. (There even is a “The End” credit in this film, a nice retro touch. I really miss “The End” credits.) The plot deals with a young country lad named D’Artagnan (Chris O’Donnell) who dreams of becoming one of the King’s Musketeers (essentially the equivalent of the Secret Service) in 17th Century France. The king is Louis XIII (Hugh O’Conor), but the real power behind the throne is Cardinal Richelieu (Tim Curry), who as the film opens is touring the dungeons under the palace in Paris and wantonly murders one of the prisoners who’s begging him for forgiveness. Richelieu got the King to disband the Musketeers because he wanted to substitute his own Cardinal’s Guards as the King’s security force, which would mean he could assassinate the King at any time he wanted and no one would have the authority to stop him. (We later learn that Richelieu put Louis XIII on the throne in the first place by having his father, Henry IV, assassinated.) Unbeknownst to anyone, Richelieu has also secretly negotiated a deal with the Duke of Buckingham, who essentially is to the King of England what Richelieu is to the King of France, to sell out France to England and put himself on the throne directly instead of having to rule through a monarch that might at any moment grow the proverbial pair and tell him to take a hike … or worse. He sends Milady Countess Sabine de Winter (Rebecca De Mornay) with the treaty to take it to England on a ship called the Persephone. Richelieu has also persuaded the King to sign an order officially disbanding the Musketeers and drafting them as common infantrymen in the upcoming war against England. Meanwhile, D’Artagnan is being chased by Girard (Paul McGann) and his brothers, who accuse him of taking liberties with their sister, and they follow him all the way to Paris.

D’Artagnan unknowingly challenges each of the three remaining Musketeers to duels, though when they finally encounter each other they decide to let him live and join their band of outlaws. D’Artagnan also meets Constance (Julie Delpy), lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne (Gabrielle Anwar), who recalls that she was put in an arranged marriage to Louis XIII but once she met him, she decided she was in love with him after all. D’Artagnan and Constance also fall in love with each other at first sight, but then she disappears from the action and they don’t finally get together until the very end. At one point the Musketeers hijack Richelieu’s private carriage, throw the gold coins in it to the starving French people, sample its alcoholic beverages and ultimately burn it, while leading Richelieu’s cavalry on a merry horseback chase in which, among other things, the Musketeers set fire to barrels of gunpowder, at least one of which blows up and takes some of Richelieu’s men with it. Ultimately the Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan recruit all the other former Musketeers to re-don their emblematic blue tunics, stage an assault on the palace in Paris, foil Richelieu’s assassination attempt on the King (which he planned because the hated British were demanding a demonstration of Richelieu’s power before they cut a deal with him), and restore the King to full power. King Louis XIII not only reinstates the Musketeers but officially names D’Artagnan to the Musketeers’ ranks, in a ceremony that looks more like a granting of knighthood than merely hiring another security guard. Loughery gives Louis this final speech that sounds all too relevant today in the Age of Trump: “This world is an uncertain realm, filled with danger. Honor undermined by the pursuit of power, freedom sacrificed when the weak are oppressed by the strong. But there are those who oppose these powerful forces, who dedicate their lives to truth, honor, and freedom.”

The 1993 The Three Musketeers is an exciting action picture in the recent modern manner, and Herek and Loughery deserve credit for creating a film with a lot of action even though they’re hamstrung by the low level of 17th century technology. It’s also a quite relentless movie, in which no sooner than one plot line starts to trail off than another one comes in and assumes equal importance. As for the casting, I had my qualms about Chris O’Donnell – like the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and James Franco in Tristan + Isolde, he seems just too modern, like he just walked in from a Renaissance Faire where he was cosplaying rather than actually inhabiting a different historical age. But the rest of the cast is quite good, and it was a stroke of at least minor genius on the part of Herek and his casting director, Sharon Bialy, to give the part of Richelieu to Tim Curry. Best known for playing Rocky Horror in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry here is almost 20 years older and even seedier. Curry gives Richelieu a marvelous portrayal of controlled evil, quite the best I’ve seen since George Arliss’s 1935 biopic (in which Richelieu was depicted sympathetically). The actors playing the Musketeers are also excellent, particularly when they reveal their secrets: Aramis once studied theology and can still quote the Bible effectively, and Porthos used to be a pirate – a skill that comes in handy when the Musketeers hijack the Persephone and sail it back to France. The Three Musketeers is a nice, engaging movie (though the repetitive action scenes were starting to wear me down by the end), and it’s fun in a way all too many “serious” action movies aren’t anymore.

It also helps that cinematographer Dean Semler for once makes the color look colorful on screen. About the only times we’re stuck with the dark, dingy, faded browns and greens that are the stuff of most “color” films today. The 17th century looked a lot darker than today’s times, and where Semler shoots in dirty browns and greens it’s because he’s filming the scenes in the dungeon and other locales where you expect things to be terribly lit. Elsewhere, especially in the many outdoor scenes, this film is like a breath of fresh air – almost literally – an explosion of color to match the film’s old-style movie action. And one of the things I liked about The Three Musketeers is that it acknowledges that a “musket” was a firearm, albeit a hideously impractical one that had laboriously to be reloaded (which included inserting a charge of gunpowder, tamping it down, loading the bullet and then cocking the trigger to prepare to fire) for each single shot. The Three (and sometimes Four) Musketeers didn’t always fight the enemies with swords the way they’ve been shown in most of the film versions. Indeed, the scene in which Richelieu and his hired gun Rochefort (Michael Wincott) test out the skills of the professional assassin they’ve engaged to kill Louis XIII by having him shoot out a portrait of the king and hit him squarely in the eye is still chilling now!