Review of The Three Musketeers (1948) by Jane H — 16 Nov 2010

Wow. What a tremendous amount of fun. And not the complete butchery of Dumas that I was expecting at all! Just a slight butchery. Or a maiming, perhaps. But still, while they fool around with the specifics of the story and lose pretty much all of the nuance, they keep a lot of the strongest and most unconventional beats (including Constance's and Buckingham's murder, which I was sure they'd chicken out of).

Sidney's direction is vibrant - he's on par with Curtiz here in terms of just how to stage and shoot swashbuckling action. Gene Kelly overacts - no great surprise, but it's worth it just to see him fight. A proto-Jackie Chan if ever there was one. The rest of the cast does fine, although a lot of characters get short-changed (Aramis, Porthos, Rochefort). Of course, it's nowhere near touching Lester's films, but it blows the 1993 Disney abortion right out of the water.