The Three Musketeers (1973)

★★

I really wanted to like this movie, but it was so campy and dated that I found myself multi-tasking, and then forgetting to actually watch the movie.

To its credit, the movie did have good sets and good costumes, and it included unexpected details from the book - like d'Artagnan's mother's healing ointment, the Cardinal's guards paying the townspeople to cheer for the Cardinal, and the Duke of Buckingham's shrine to Anne of Austria.

But then, other important details from the book were inexplicably changed, seemingly for no reason. d'Artagnan did not lose his letter of introduction when he first encountered Rochefort, and d'Artagnan did not save Constance when she was first kidnapped by the Cardinal's guards - she got away merely by being clumsy! Obviously, Constance was made into a klutz for comic purposes, but why cut out a good swashbuckling scene? Frequently, opportunities to showcase swashbuckling were enhanced by bringing in the three musketeers to aid d'Artagnan, though they were not all four so frequently brought together in the book. At one point, it's made clear that d'Artagnan is illiterate - What!? Why!? Weird.

Overall, the movie was just too corny, and the actors never drew me in. I wanted so much to like it, I even tried to watch the sequel, The Four Musketeers, which presumably finishes the story from where the first movie left off. It's not often that I just give up on a movie and turn it off, but I really just found myself not enjoying the movie at all. Now I can't even give the sequel a rating because I didn't even finish watching it!