Show Business: One For All: The New Musketeers

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Here are musketeers who miss, constantly swashing their buckles right in the wrong places. D'Artagnan furiously swings out on a rope to unhorse an adversary, only to swing right past both horse and rider and come down in a pool of mud. Athos, about to finish off an enemy, finds himself suddenly hooked by the collar and lifted into the air by a giant, donkey-powered water wheel. D'Artagnan's love, the comely Constance (Raquel Welch), wafts innocently through it all, knocking over vases, dropping pots and pans and sweetly stepping into spitoons.

Lester stages elaborately orchestrated free-for-alls. He takes a secret meeting between the Queen (Geraldine Chaplin) and her lover, the Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), out of the Queen's apartments and into the royal laundry room, turning it into a magnificently messy melee between the Musketeers and the Cardinal's guards—a riot of indigo dye in the face, lathery soap slides, and wickedly glorious slaughter.

Lester filled up the space around The Three Musketeers with a multiplicity of fascinating objects that really work. He found or had reproduced an awesome collection of 1620s artifacts such as coaches, farm implements, machinery and games. Almost every scene has someone playing at something historically accurate—greased pole seesaw matches, a candle-powered pinball apparatus, a form of bowling in which the targets are life-size cutouts of ladies.

He also reproduced the crude, battering sword play of the era. Since Lester avoids using stunt men, he nearly did in a few of his actors: Reed took a blade thrust through the wrist; Christopher Lee (Rochefort) was stabbed in the side; York almost lost an eye from a miscalculated blow. "That kind of thing was worth it to get the effect Dick wanted," says Reed. "But you could break your bloody back riding without stirrups or saddles as we often had to do."

The complications involved in transporting 200 crewmen and hundreds of extras, cows, chickens, pigs and horses across 55 different locations in Spain, left almost no time for rehearsals. Lester often rolled his cameras straightaway at preliminary run-throughs, a tactic occasionally rewarded by such accidental verités as Raquel Welch's spraining her arm during a fight sequence with Faye Dunaway (Milady), or Roy Kinnear (Planchet) taking a thudding fall when his horse collided with a tree. Both "rehearsals" are in the finished film. "There is a quality of excitement and tension when actors are not quite sure what they're doing," says Lester with a nearly straight face.

General Anarchy. The organizer of all this genial mayhem is a Philadelphia-born expatriate who sidestepped into a job as a local TV director after earning a degree in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Lester gravitated to England in 1955 and discovered his real niche as a BBC television director. With British Comedians Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, he put together a series of TV comedies that featured outrageous sight gags, vertiginous action and general anarchy.