Show Business: One For All: The New Musketeers

"If we can make films that are useful as well as entertaining, marvelous," says Director Richard Lester. "But cinema must reflect the temper of the times. We must choose material not only on the basis of what we feel deeply, but on whether or not anybody's bloody well going to see it."

It has taken the 42-year-old Lester 15 years of seesawing the highs and lows of moviemaking to reach that conclusion. Lester shot to prominence as the director of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), followed by the surreal comedy The Knack (1965). He quickly became the hottest new director around; his trick-camera, quick-cut editing had a breezy spontaneity that spoke for the swinging London of the '60s. With the artistic freedom that success can buy, Lester then turned his comedic scattergun to more serious and deeply felt purpose. Starting in 1967 he made one troubling social satire about modern materialists (Petulia) and two savage antiwar polemics (How I Won the War and The Bed-Sitting Room). All three fizzled at the box office, and by 1969 Lester found himself effectively out of the movie business.

Now, with his first film in five years, Lester has returned to light farce and good fortune. In its first ten days of release in the U.S., Lester's new version of Alexandre Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers has brought in more than $3.5 million—a hefty indication that what audiences bloody well want to see is sheer entertainment. Meticulously constructed, broadly funny and relatively chaste, The Three Musketeers is a film for the whole family, and one that is not about children or animals.

The film tells the familiar tale of those beloved cavaliers Athos (Oliver

Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) and D'Artagnan (Michael York). But Lester has added to their motto, "All for one and one for all," his own realistic coda: "And every man for himself." His musketeers are mercenaries, albeit loyal ones, and their adventures occur on the mud-puddled roads and in the filthy rooms of 17th century France.

Dumas' story has a prodigal range of appeal: the grandeur of the court of Louis XIII; the scandalous romance between his Queen and England's Chief Minister, the Duke of Buckingham; the political intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu; and most of all, the high-flying exploits of young Musketeer-Aspirant D'Artagnan and his three companions as they battle to foil the Cardinal's schemes and thus cover themselves with glory, honor and material reward.

Off and Romping. Lester's film has all this and more—sophisticated satire, opulent costumes, crashing swordplay, and a feast of historical fact—noblemen sniff clove-studded oranges as they walk through grimily Hogarthian streets; the King plays chess on a lawn-drawn board, with the palace dogs his four-footed chess pieces. Within this lovingly recreated world, Lester's musketeers are off and romping through an audacious barrage of pratfalls, sight gags, tottering demises and improbable acrobatics reminiscent of silent comedies.