The Four Musketeers

The direct continuation of the previous film. The queen has been saved and the guards have won. Now Rochefort and Milady want their account settled. Milady moves to the centre of the narrative. The cardinal gives her a task and writes her a paper in exchange; that paper circulates until the end of the film. Constance is hidden in a convent. D'Artagnan tries to find her. From there the film proceeds darker. The siege of La Rochelle, breakfast on a rampart, a prison and a riverbank. What the narrative is interested in is not adventure but consequence: the first film was a comedy; this one opens the same characters in the same tone and then really kills them. The Milady section is the best written part. She convinces a guard over a matter of days, and that section runs entirely on talk. The fights are deliberately clumsy. Swords catch, men fall, and the heroes end up in mud; it is a conscious correction applied to the genre. The best known story about the production concerns the shooting. Both films were made together in one period and the cast had agreed to one film; that it had been split in two was learned shortly before release and there was legal action. After the affair a new clause entered contracts; performers asked for the number of films they were working on to be written down. Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee and Raquel Welch are in the cast. Richard Lester directed. Who it is for: anyone who has seen the first film. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the same cheer; this one changes tone in the middle and the ending is genuinely bitter.