On DVD: What the '70s-Era Musketeers Can Teach Us About Action, Bromance and Fun

For all of our CGI-ed Johnny Depp blockbusters, we've forgotten how to properly buckle a swash, as it were -- costume-action films are now either 99 percent digital hootenanny or buttoned-down Classics Illustrated adaptations. We forget that readers and theatergoers in the 19th century loved their life-or-death mano-a-mano and mad-dash escapes and preposterous physical feats just as we do, which is why pioneering pulp like Alexandre Dumas has never been out of print. Of course, in the '70s, when the Richard Lester made the best Dumas movies back-to-back, stunts were performed by real people -- even, sometimes, the movie stars themselves. And when action involves actual humans, it's not just merely visceral thrill, but story.

We'll see if the newly announced versions of The Three Musketeers will err on the side of flesh or pixel, and if it retains the elan the story requires. It's difficult to imagine beating Lester at his game -- he was essentially a comic filmmaker, and he did turn bouncy pop songs into iconic comedy in A Hard Day's Night, managing in the process to make a film about friendship. The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) are, at bottom, one big four-way bromance as well, but they're also a top-grade costume-adventure blast, and a standard of their genre. (The last time anyone this ground broached significantly occurred in 1998's DiCaprio-as-boy-king version of The Man in the Iron Mask, in which the middle-aged Musketeers were reduced to a battle of Megadeth-like wigs and astounding noses: Gabriel Byrne's axe-like extension, Jeremy Irons's aquiline member, John Malkovich's puttyish honker, all dwarfed by Depardieu's penis-shaped schnoz.)

In Lester's two-part epic, the emphasis is on boys-will-be-boys esprit, a sense of raw, rebellious Errol Flynn-ish fun that was an integral part of popular culture for centuries but seems to be utterly missing today. The story, stretched out from Dumas' original gout of court intrigue and double betrayals, is primarily a battle against Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston), but the party begins with the boys: Oliver Reed (Athos), Richard Chamberlain (Aramis), Frank Finlay (Porthos, played as the Keith Moon of the group), and the over-earnest Michael York (D'Artagnan), all of whom (but especially Reed) manage to make plumed chapeaus and satin breeches look super-cool.

The casting coups continue with Faye Dunaway, in her redoubtable prime, as Milady de Winter, Christopher Lee as the scalawag Rochefort, and the ridiculously hot Raquel Welch, in what could be called her career apex, as Constance, a lady-in-waiting in love with D'Artagnan but as chronically clumsy as a fourth Stooge, constantly subject to head knocks and pratfalls.

Sure, the upshot of Lester's diptych is a bit old-fashioned today, and chilled at times by outrageous overdubbing. And there're no computer-game impossibilities or swooshings. But the humor is affectionate, the joie de vivre is infectious, and the historical details, which Lester clearly loves, are transporting. If you can't have fun with this stuff, you're too used to having your entertainment media do everything for you but tell you when to turn the xBox off.