The Three Musketeers (1973)

Richard Lester's 1973 The Three Musketeers is, by wide critical consensus, one of the finest screen versions of Dumas's novel ever made, and also one of the loosest in tone, even while staying remarkably close to the book's actual plot. Understanding both halves of that paradox is the key to understanding what this film does with Dumas's characters and story.

A Faithful Plot, Filtered Through Slapstick

Structurally, Lester's film, originally shot alongside its 1974 sequel The Four Musketeers as one continuous production before being split in two, follows the novel's actual events more closely than almost any other adaptation on this list. D'Artagnan's arrival in Paris, his triple duel-turned-friendship with the three musketeers, the mission to recover the queen's diamond studs from the Duke of Buckingham, Milady's manipulation of Felton, and Constance's poisoning are all present and largely intact. Where the film departs from the book isn't in what happens, but in how it feels while happening.

Lester, fresh off A Hard Day's Night and Help!, brought a director's eye trained on anarchic physical comedy to a novel that, while funny in places, is not fundamentally a comedy. Sword fights in this film are staged as much for laughs as for danger: combatants stumble over furniture, get distracted by passing chickens, and generally behave less like elite soldiers and more like brawling schoolboys who happen to be extraordinarily good with a blade. It's a deliberate choice, and one that reads on screen as a kind of loving demystification: these are legendary heroes, the film seems to say, but they're also just guys, prone to vanity, drunkenness, and slapstick mishap.

Richelieu, Simplified for Legibility — But Not as Much as Later Films

Charlton Heston's Cardinal Richelieu is commanding and coldly intelligent, closer in spirit to the novel's formidable political operator than the pantomime villain later adaptations (most notably the 1993 Disney version, covered elsewhere on this site) would settle for. Heston plays Richelieu as someone who believes, with real conviction, that his machinations serve France — which is precisely how Dumas's own text treats him. It's worth noting, as this site's own piece on the real Cardinal Richelieu discusses, that the flattening of Richelieu into pure cartoon evil is largely a cinematic tradition rather than something inherited from Dumas's own pages, and 1973's version resists that flattening more successfully than most.

That said, the film does compress and simplify some of the novel's political texture. The book's careful, almost procedural rendering of court intrigue (who reports to whom, which nobles owe which allegiances) is necessarily thinned out for a two-hour runtime, leaving Richelieu's scheme feeling more like a single discrete plot (expose the queen's affair) than the ongoing, multi-front political struggle the novel depicts him waging across hundreds of pages.

Faye Dunaway's Milady: Menace Without the Full Backstory

Dunaway's Milady de Winter is icy, controlled, and actually unsettling, a performance widely regarded as one of the film's strongest. But the film significantly trims her backstory. Lord Winter, who in the novel formally accuses Milady of murdering his brother and sets much of her downfall in motion, doesn't appear. The Executioner of Lille's personal grudge against her, tied to Athos's own devastating history with her, goes unmentioned entirely. What the film keeps is her present-tense menace: the manipulation of Felton remains a highlight, staged with real psychological creepiness. What it loses is the accumulated weight of her history, which in the novel complicates a reader's feelings about her fate in exactly the way discussed in this site's own deeper essay on her character. On screen, stripped of that context, she reads more straightforwardly as a villain to be defeated than as a woman whose crimes have a documented, troubling origin.

Rochefort Absorbs Another Character's Role

One of the film's more significant structural changes is folding the Comte de Wardes, a minor rival of d'Artagnan's in the novel notable mainly for a mistaken-identity bedroom subplot involving Milady, almost entirely out of the story, with Christopher Lee's Rochefort absorbing his most important plot functions instead. This is a sensible screenwriting compression: Wardes's subplot is one of the novel's stranger, more dated detours, and folding his narrative purpose into an existing, already-established antagonist streamlines the film without losing anything essential to the main plot. It's the kind of adaptation choice that a careful reader of the novel will notice and, on reflection, probably approve of.

An Ending That Echoes the Book's Own Ambivalence

The novel's actual conclusion is more morally complicated than popular memory tends to credit: Richelieu, having failed to expose the queen, doesn't punish d'Artagnan for the failure of his scheme; he rewards him, granting him a lieutenant's commission in the Musketeers, seemingly recognizing raw talent and utility even in an opponent. Lester's film honors this beat rather than manufacturing a more conventional villain's comeuppance, which some contemporary viewers found anticlimactic. It's a rare case of the film trusting the novel's own, more ambiguous instincts about power and pragmatism over a Hollywood-standard ending where the villain is punished outright.

Real Locations, Real Texture

Shot substantially on location in Spain, using real castles and palaces standing in for seventeenth-century France and England, the film has a tactile, lived-in physicality that studio-bound versions of the story often lack. Costumes look worn rather than pristine; interiors feel really cold and drafty rather than soundstage-warm. This isn't a plot change, but it does meaningfully affect how the story reads on screen, closer to the grubby, dangerous world the novel implies its characters inhabit, rather than the more sanitized version of seventeenth-century France later, glossier adaptations sometimes present.

What Gets Cut for Time

Beyond the character-specific changes already discussed, the film, even across its two-part 1973/1974 structure, necessarily compresses much of the novel's slower, more digressive middle section. Extended subplots involving minor nobility, some of Porthos's comic set-pieces with his wealthy older patroness, and much of Dumas's wry narratorial commentary don't survive the transition to screen, simply because a visual medium has no clean equivalent for an author directly addressing the reader. None of these cuts are especially controversial among readers of the novel; they're the expected casualties of adapting a serialized, digression-friendly nineteenth-century novel into a feature film with a fixed runtime.

A Two-Part Structure That Mirrors the Novel's Own Pacing

It's worth understanding the unusual production history here, because it shapes how faithfully the story gets told. Lester shot enough footage for a single film's worth of story, only to have producer Ilya Salkind split it into two releases, 1973's The Three Musketeers and 1974's The Four Musketeers, without informing the cast in advance, a decision that led to a labor dispute and new industry guidelines about disclosing multi-film contracts. Whatever the behind-the-scenes controversy, the split had a true creative upside: because the material wasn't compressed into a single feature's runtime, considerably more of the novel's actual incident survives on screen than a standard single-film adaptation could manage. Viewers who watch both parts together get something closer to the novel's full scope than almost any other film version has attempted, precisely because the production accidentally ended up with the runtime budget of two features rather than one.

This matters for the story's political and personal stakes both. The siege of La Rochelle, a real historical event Dumas weaves throughout the novel's second half, gets real screen time rather than being reduced to a single establishing shot, a choice many later, single-film adaptations simply can't afford. Milady's downfall, spread across several distinct novel chapters building dread and inevitability, similarly gets room to breathe rather than being rushed to its conclusion in the interest of runtime.

How This Version Stacks Up Against Later Adaptations

Comparing this film to what came after clarifies exactly what Lester and screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser got right. The 1993 Disney version, discussed in its own dedicated comparison on this site, jettisons most of the novel's moral complexity in favor of a clean good-versus-evil children's adventure, entertaining on its own terms, but a much thinner engagement with Dumas's actual text. The 2011 Paul W.S. Anderson version leans into steampunk spectacle at the near-total expense of character work. Against that backdrop, the 1973 film's willingness to let its heroes be actually flawed (vain, occasionally cowardly, prone to real moral compromise) and its villain be intelligent rather than cartoonish stands out as unusually faithful to what Dumas wrote, even while wrapping that fidelity in a tone the novel itself doesn't quite share.

That tonal gap is really the film's only significant departure from the source material. Dumas's novel has real wit, but it isn't a comedy in the way Lester's film frequently plays as one; the book's violence has real consequence and its romances real heartbreak in a register the film's antic energy sometimes undercuts. Readers coming to the novel after loving this film sometimes find themselves surprised by how much more melancholy the source material can be, particularly in its treatment of Athos's backstory and the accumulating cost of the musketeers' adventures. That's not a flaw in either version; it's simply a reminder that adaptation always involves choosing which register of the source material to foreground, and Lester chose exuberance over melancholy wherever the two were in tension.

Michael York's d'Artagnan captures the novel's blend of impulsiveness and true skill without over-romanticizing him; he's callow at the start in a way the book's own d'Artagnan is. Oliver Reed's Athos carries real, wounded gravity beneath his comic drunkenness, arguably the performance that best honors the novel's psychological complexity among the three musketeers. Frank Finlay's Porthos and Richard Chamberlain's Aramis lean harder into comic archetype than the book's fuller characterizations, though neither performance is disrespectful to the source material, simply compressed, as any adaptation of a nearly seven-hundred-page novel into a two-hour film inevitably must compress its ensemble.

Taken as a whole, Lester's 1973 Three Musketeers earns its reputation as one of the strongest adaptations precisely because it understands which parts of Dumas's tone to amplify (the wit, the physical bravado, the essential decency underneath the swagger) and which to compress (the political texture, Milady's fuller history) without ever losing the shape of the story Dumas told.

Read the source material in full at The Three Musketeers, or see more adaptations on In Movies.