The Three Musketeers, a la Richard Lester at the FIlm Society of Lincoln Center

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Thanks to Andy Webster's NY Times article, I'm on my way to filling in the gaps of my 'Dumas on film' knowledge. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting Richard Lester: The Running Jumping Pop Cinema Iconoclast series and I'm thrilled that they are including Lester's trilogy of the French classic brought to life by a bunch of Englishmen.  The first two films were shot at the same time, and broken into The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers because d'Artagnan does become a Musketeer midway through the novel. I've seen the former many times, and am happy to go see its counterpart.

That is followed by Lester's 1989 The Return of the Musketeers. The idea was to follow Dumas to his lesser-known sequel, called Twenty Years After (Vingt Ans Apres).  It's a terrific read, bringing our heroes to the scaffold of Charles I in England. I'm sure the film makes up its own plot, as it substitutes Milady's son for a daughter, played by none other than Kim Cattrall.  The film has a place in the annals of sad film notoriety because Roy Kinnear, who played Planchet, died as a result of an on-set accident, which, as the Film Society site tells us,

". . . lead Lester to renounce directing features. But the resultant film (never released in the U.S. and currently unavailable on DVD), with its jocularity and swashbuckling action, provides a fitting valedictory to both men’s careers."

This post of my love for the novels is one of my earliest for this blog, back in the day of 2007.

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I watched a little of Richard Lester's 1974 The Three Musketeers the other evening for the fourth or fifth time, and it proved to be a powerful cinematic madeleine for me.

There’s nothing quite like a teenage passion, especially when it’s the discovery of a book or a film that recognizes your own DNA. The passion that made my heart sing at that simpler time in my life was the world of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan.

Now no eye rolling out there.

Oh, I had visited with Sir Walter Scott, read the obligatory Victor Hugo, and danced a little with Sabatini. But nothing got under my skin the way Alexandre Dumas did with his novel The Three Musketeers and its sequels Twenty Years After and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (or Ten Years Later).

I was self aware enough in high school to be a little concerned that I might be Miniver Cheever.

Mivinver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

Or, as Joni Mitchell explains it, “All Romantics meet the same fate some day/Cynical and drunk, and boring someone in some dark café.”

So I knew I was at risk, but reading the Musketeers was so exciting I couldn’t help myself.

It’s Dumas’s strength of voice. He moves the story along so easily, primarily through those masterful character pictures. We watch Entourage now, but what is that but an updating of this seminal story about the effect that true friends, real fellow travelers have on each other’s lives.

Steed had an interesting point about the 1998 Man in the Iron Mask film, that it was the old actor guard--Jeremy Irons, Gerard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne, John Malkovich-- bowing, literally, to Leo DiCaprio, the new king. Dumas never wrote a novel with that title. It’s actually one plot line in the gargantuan Vicomte de Bragelonne that was later published as a freestanding book. One of my earliest, deeply literary experiences was finding the entire 9 volumes of Vicomte in the Hofstra University library when my older brother was there. He took them out for me one by one, and I needed to use folio scissors to open many of the pages. I felt like I had found a portal into the “world of literature.”

Get the Damn Motto Right
And so I have a serious fan’s sense of privilege when it comes to anything related to Dumas. Claude Schopp may be the preeminent Dumas scholar, but I’m his amateur counterpart.

And I must state, unequivocally, that the famous Musketeer quotation is

ALL for one, one for all.

Not the other way around. It comes at the end of chapter 9, and it’s D’Artagnan’s line, whether he says it in English or in French.
“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all--that is our motto, is it not?”

“And yet--” said Porthos.

“Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once.

Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by D’Artagnan: “All for one, one for all.”

Yes, the whole point is that the are ALL for one, not the ego of one for the group. I have seen it wrong everywhere, even in a WSJ article about the novel! Although I must say the fanfic community gets it right, and a Fraiser episode did too.

In November 2002 Dumas’s remains were disinterred from his home village and moved to the Pantheon where he rightfully took his place with France’s literary giants. His casket was draped with a blue covering, and there it said “Tous pour un, un pour tous.” Pictured above.

The French may get a lot wrong, but they are not going to get this detail wrong. This should put to rest any lingering confusion.

And Now “The Plot Thickens”

Even with all these deep connections I have to this writer, to these characters, my grandmother made it even more special.

Toward the end of her 93 years on earth, she was getting fuzzy about things. Not Alzheimer’s, just some hardening of the arteries. One day Grammy was talking to my mother, who was her sole caretaker, telling her that she had had a husband who was a mailman “who came home every day.”

My mother said, “Yes, I know Mom. Your husband was my father.”

Grammy looked at my mother with her bright, bright eyes, then dropped her head down, and with a little shake and smile, said “The plot thickens.”

It was one of the funniest family moments of all time.

And it is the title of Chapter 11 of The Three Musketeers, as Cardinal Richelieu's machinations unfold and we get closer to meeting the great villainess Milady. Dumas isn’t particularly credited with coining this phrase, but I couldn’t find an earlier citation for it. The French is L'intrigue se noue. 

 It is a rare teenage passion that gains more resonance as time goes by.

My own remembrance of my past love for this world has led me to order the new translation of 3M by Russian translator expert Richard Pevear that came out in 2006.

As for the length of this post, it must have something to do with that madeleine metaphor. I guess you evoke it at your own risk.

 Mapeel     8/09/2015     Film, literature