Silence & Silver 22: The Three Musketeers (1921)
All for One, One for All
The Three Musketeers was an unexpectedly perfect movie for the 1920s.
First, you have the protagonist D’Artagnan, a country bumpkin with dreams of moving to the big city to join the Musketeers—a classic Roaring Twenties fable.1 Then you have the opulent court of Louis XIII,2 where wealth, power, intrigue, and decadence reign. The theme of adultery—or the implication of adultery—figured prominently in everything from Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), so it’s hardly unexpected to see it treated so explicitly here. Film audiences in the 1920s were, in other words, both starry-eyed sentimentalists and sophisticated cynics, though they liked it when romance won out in the end. It’s not surprising, therefore, that The Three Musketeers completed what The Mark of Zorro had already begun, and made Douglas Fairbanks the most dashing swordsman Hollywood had ever known—a charming everyman from days gone by in a modern world that seemed to have lost its soul.
Fairbanks really is in his element throughout the film, effortlessly blending comedy, romance, and swashbuckling as the young blade who wants to be a musketeer. He leaps, tumbles, and otherwise displays his restless physicality, whether he’s clowning, wooing, or showing off his skill with the rapier. Of all of Fairbanks’s performances, D’Artagnan might be his most well-rounded—he gets to do it all. The comic situations are perfect for his cinematic persona: he challenges the first man he meets after leaving home to a duel, only to be restrained by a mob who think he's out of his wits. He trades his horse—who just minutes earlier he was ready to fight a duel over—for a stylish hat so the pretty girls in Paris won't laugh at him. He chooses his lodging house based purely on the attractiveness of the landlord's daughter, watching her walk back and forth between two different houses before finally asking which one she lives in, and promptly taking the room. On arriving at their headquarters, he manages to offend the three best swordsmen in the king’s musketeers in a matter of minutes, and resolves to duel all three of them at once.
(Dueling is illegal in France at the time, but D'Artagnan pays that no mind.)
Of course, D’Artagnan’s guileless passion and noble heart quickly win over the Musketeers, and soon they’ve teamed up against Cardinal Richelieu’s hated personal guard, who have usurped the musketeer’s authority and diminished their prestige. The duel in the apothecary’s shop with the Cardinal’s most skilled swordsman is easily one of Fairbanks's best, combining thrilling swordplay with physical comedy and close-quarters acrobatics. The cinematography, while simple and at times frankly pedestrian, allows the swordplay and stunts to take center stage, drawing the audience into the thrilling world of the Musketeers and their adventures. While it lacks the colossal sets of The Thief of Bagdad (1924) or even Robin Hood (1922), The Three Musketeers nonetheless presents a seamless fictional world of romance and danger for Fairbanks to play in, and the audience to enjoy.
The cast that inhabits this world really makes it work. The cold, scheming, almost skeletal Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel de Brulier) serves as the perfect foil for Fairbanks’s bluff, passionate portrayal of D’Artagnan—a contrast Fairbanks would revist in The Thief of Bagdad.3 His henchmen Father Joseph (Lon Poff), the Comte de Rochefort (Boyd Irwin), and Milady de Winter (Barbara La Marr) are all delightfully sinister, each in some way embodying the decline of virtue caused the Cardinal’s influence at court. The King (Adolphe Menjou) and Queen (Mary MacLaren) of France are suitably ambigious characters—perhaps, good-hearted deep down, but also easily manipulated because of their character flaws and vices. Louis is ill-tempered and capricious—Anne gives way too easily to the entreaties of men.
Meanwhile, the Musketeers—Athos (Léon Bary), Porthos (George Siegmann), and Aramis (Eugene Pallette)—are simple men of action: quick to draw their swords, always on the lookout for wine, women, and money, but also generous, brave, and honorable. They act as a unit, symbolizing the virtues (and vices) of the old ways of chivalry, romance, and courage. They share each other’s poverty, but also each other’s triumphs—truly “all for one and one for all.” Constance (Marguerite De La Motte), D’Artagnan’s love interest, is deeply involved in the conspiratorial goings-on at court, putting her a cut above the fainting damsels that usually played opposite dashing heroes in early swashbucklers (see Julanne Johnston in The Thief of Bagdad).
If the movie has a flaw, it’s the feeling that—for the middle portion, at least—most of the scenes involving the Musketeers are simply “famous bits you remember from the book” that don’t do much to advance the plot. They’re funny—and 19th-century novels tended to be highly episodic, since they were published in serial form—but it does make the convergence of the Musketeers’ swashbuckling hijinks and the sinister intrigues at court feel slightly jarring and abrupt. But this is a small quibble, and I suspect the tension is inherent to the story itself, and deliberately so. The decent (if sometimes boyish and juvenile) world of D’Artagnan and the Musketeers is supposed to feel very different from the shadowy and distrustful world of the French court. It may be too much to say that The Three Musketeers is about two worlds in conflict—the simpler, older world of honor, romance, and heroism, and the more sophisticated, more modern world of intrigue, sex, and power.4 But we are certainly meant to feel the contrast between the plainspoken honesty of the country boy D’Artagnan and the two-faced scheming of the urbane chessmaster Richelieu, and sense that Louis XIII might have been better served if he had more simple, honest men in his court, and fewer clever cardinals.
Postscript: This film was chosen by my wife Ren, and is being posted today in honor of her birthday. I really don’t think I couldn’t gotten this far if I wasn’t married to someone who appreciated silent films and who constantly supported my ambitions to be a (very unsuccessful) writer. My love, may we still be watching Douglas Fairbanks films together for the rest of our lives.
See my review of Safety Last! (1923) starring Harold Lloyd.
That’s Louis the Just, the gay one. Not to be confused with Louis XIV (his son, the Sun King), Louis XV (his great-great-grandson, the boring one), or Louis XVI (his great-great-great-great grandson, the one that lost his head in the Revolution).
Fairbanks frequently recycled ideas from earlier films, as can clearly be seen when comparing the emaciated figure of the sinister Cardinal Richelieu with the similarly ghoulish silhouette cut by Sōjin as the Prince of the Mongols.
Actually, that may be exactly what the original novel is about, for all I know. I’ve never read it.