The Three Must-Get-Theres

Dumas's Three Musketeers is turned into a joke from beginning to end here. D'Artagnan arrives in Paris, meets the musketeers and sets about saving the queen's honour; but something from outside the period slips into every scene: a typewriter, a telephone, a motorcycle. Linder does not explain any of it, he uses it as though it had always been there. The faster the story loses its seriousness, the faster it moves. Max Linder, the pioneer of French silent comedy, wrote, directed and starred in this film made in America. Its direct target is the adaptation of The Three Musketeers released the year before with Douglas Fairbanks. He mimics Fairbanks mercilessly; by all accounts Fairbanks loved the film. Chaplin is known to have regarded Linder as his master, and this is one of the most relaxed examples of that mastery.