Four of the musketeers

About six weeks ago, I mentioned the 1970s version of The Three Musketeers, and how because the producers really made too much material, they decided to split the movie into two, even though this would piss of the actors. The second of those movies got the name The Four Musketeers (sometimes also subtitled Milady's Revenge or The Revenge of Milady), and that movie will be on tomorrow (Oct. 4) at 10:30 AM. in honor of Charlton Heston.

If you remember the first movie, as it ended the musketeers had just saved the bacon of Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), the Queen of France, who was haing an illicit relationship with the English Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward), even though their two countries were at war. Part of that war was religious in nature, and French Protestants were in rebellion in the Breton port of La Rochelle. Cardinal Richelieu (that's Charlton Heston) had figured out that it's the queen's dressmaker Constance (Raquel Welch) who has been passing the message between Anne and Buckingham, well, with help from D'Artagnan (Michael York) who is her boyfriend. So Richelieu orders his men to capture Constance.

Meanwhile Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway) wants to gain revenge on the musketeers as well, so she goes in with Richelieu by seducing d'Artagnan to get him away from Constance. D'Artagnan can't be bothered to think with his big head, so he takes the bait. D'Artagnan also finds out that Milady has a brand, which was a sentence for a crime she committed. It's also a sign that she had been in a relatonship with Athos (Oliver Reed), but he killed her -- or he thought he did -- when he found out about Milady's criminality.

Anyhow, the musketeers set out to find Constance, and all of them but D'Artagnan eventually do, sending her to Armentières for safe-keeping until the musketeers can do their other duties and go back and fetch her. Milady, for her part, still wants to kill d'Artagnan and Constance, and the rest of the movie is one long series of adventures and action scenes as Milady's right-hand man Rochefort (Christopher Lee) pursues the musketeers across western France.

The plot of The Four Musketeers is not hampered as much by the editing of the movie into two separate features as I thought The Three Musketeers was. That having been said, I thought the main plot was fairly thin, and more or less a hook on which all those action scenes were hung. Now, it does feel like the stars making this are having a blast doing it, since they didn't know yet they were to get shafted by only getting paid for one movie while making two. Oliver Reed is well cast; Heston is getting into the eminence grise phase, and all of the women feel slightly miscast. But The Four Musketeers is ultimately just about entertaining enough to be worth a watch.

Three of the Musketeers

Tomorrow's (Aug. 22) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Geraldine Chaplin. I happen to have recently watched one of her movies that's not part of tomorrow's tribute. But then, I noticed that I happen to have one of tomorrow's movies on my DVR, so I made a point of watching that: the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers. You can see it at 12:30 PM.

Chaplin isn't the star here, and she's certainly not one of the musketeers. Top billing goes to Oliver Reed as Athos, and to Michael York as d'Artagnan. This version of Dumas' story presents d'Artagnan as a naïf from the countryside during the reign of Louis XIII who gets the crazy idea that he could become one of the King's Musketeers. So he sets off for Paris, eventually running into the three men we know from the book: the aforementioned Athos, Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain). And wouldn't you know it, but d'Artagnan immediately gets himself challenged to duels by each of them.

However, they're interruped by some of the guards representing Cardinal Richeliue (Charlton Heston). Richelieu was the power behind the throne in 17th century France, and wanted to consolidate that power even more, so he had a thing about the Musketeers and wanted to destroy them. The Musketeers and d'Artagnan win the battle with Richelieu's men, and the other three make d'Artagnan an honorary member of their merry band. On to Paris and the king and queen (that's Geraldine Chaplin playing the part of the queen).

In addition to the adventure, there's a lot of love in the movie, as this version of the film is more true to the original novel and thanks to the end of the Production Code even bawdier than previous versions could be. D'Artagnan has started an affair with the queen's dressmaker, Constance (Raquel Welch), while the queen herself is about to get involved with an old boyfriend, the English Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward). As a token of remembrance, the queen gives the Duke of Buckingham an old necklace that the king had given her but that she doesn't wear anymore.

What the queen doesn't know is that Milady (Faye Dunaway), one of her ladies-in-waiting, saw this, and Milady lets Richelieu know, so that he can get one over on the king by putting him in an embarrassing situation involving the necklace that's no longer there. It's up to the Musketeers to get the necklace back to the queen, but the Duke of Buckingham is already back in England and Richelieu's men are waiting along the way to kill the Musketeers....

When director Richard Lester started shooting The Three Musketeers, the producers' original plan was to make an epic film. But the producers realized that wouldn't work and decided to split things up into two features (which ticked the actors off no end since they sure didn't get paid for two features). As such, it feels like there's some plot missing. Or, at least a lot of what would be plot is instead replaced by ever more elaborate set-piece swashbuckling. What's left isn't exactly bad, but it does feel slightly off, as if it's both too complex and having gaps at the same time.

The swashbuckling, however, means that the action rarely stops, and if you like swashbuckling, then you're definitely going to like this movie. Also, the second movie made from the rest of the material, The Four Musketeers, follows at 2:30 PM. I haven't seen it yet; maybe it will fill in some of the gaps from the first movie.

The Woman Who Shot Liberty Valance

Raquel Welch was honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before was Hannie Caulder, so I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Welch plays Hannie Caulder, a woman who lives in an isolated part of the old west with her husband, who manages one of the changing stations for a stagecoach company. The Clemens brothers: Rufus (Strother Martin), Frank (Jack Elam), and Emmett (Ernest Borgnine) are an outlaw gang robbing banks. After one of their heists goes wrong, they make a getaway, which is how they wind up at the Caulder station. That's very bad news for the Caulders, as the Clemens brothers kill Hannie's husband before raping her and leaving her for dead when they set the place on fire.

Although they leave her for dead, you know she's going to survive, since all of this happens in the first reel of the movie, and we wouldn't have a movie if Hannie dies right at the beginning. Or, at least, we'd have a much different movie than the one we do. Hannie survives, after which she meets Thomas Price (Robert Culp). Price is a bounty hunter, which means that he has to use a gun to capture the bad guys. So that's two skills Hannie would like: how to find bad guys, and then how to kill them. Because, having been raped by the Clemens brothers, she sure wants revenge, and who can blame her.

Price isn't too sanguine about the idea, since Hannie doesn't know how to use a gun. He also knows that the sort of quest she wants to go on is something that's going to change her, and not for the better. But Hannie isn't to be stopped in her desire to get the Clemens brothers. With that in mind, Price takes her to a coastal cottage where Bailey (Christopher Lee) lives. Bailey is a gunmaker, and Price recommends using Bailey to make the gun that Hannie can then use to try to kill the Clemens brothers, she needing a gun specifically designed for a woman's physical needs. Price also tries to teach Hannie how to act in a gunfight, since it requires different skills from just target shooting.

Still, Hannie has difficulty with all of this, as we see when a different gang approaches the house, resulting in a gunfight in which Hannie does not acquit herself well, at least not by Price's standards, which to be fair to him are a life and death matter. You do want to survive the gunfight after all, don't you?

The Clemens gang are still around, and when Price and Hannie find out where they are, both of them follow the gang for the final showdown, ending the movie in a fairly compact time just under 90 minutes.

Having said that, Hannie Caulder feels a lot like something that would have worked better as an episode of something in one of those old TV westerns where a main character teaches a guest-starring Welch how to win a gunfight. It feels like there's surprisingly little going on in the movie. Not that it's a bad movie, just that it's fairly lightweight. Raquel Welch felt she never got good enough opportunities because she was typecast as a sex symbol, and she and her then husband made this one independently in order to showcase her in something more serious. Welch does show that she's a more capable actress than she's often given credit for, and, given the right script, probably could have been successful at least in supporting roles in more serious stuff.

Hannie Caulder isn't a great movie, but it's certainly a watchable enough movie.

Bitter Victory

Earlier this year, I bought this 5-film "war" movie box set. (Young Winston, which I blogged about not so long ago, is only partly a war movie, while I wouldn't call The Prisoner a war film at all.) I had recorded Bitter Victory before picking up this set, and finally got around to watching it.

The scene is North Africa during World War II, when the Germans still control a fair portion of North Africa, notably Benghazi. The British command in Cairo wants to get some important information from the Germans, necessitating a commando operation. Who to lead it? They have two choices. Capt. Leith (Richard Burton) knows the area and speaks Arabic, having studied the archaeology of North Africa. But he's only a captain. Maj. Brand (Curd Jürgens) has rank on Leith, but is a by the books officer who doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the men under him. So the general makes the Solomonic decision to have both men go with the rest of the commandos, with Brand nominally in command.

Brand and Leith then go to dinner, where Brand introduces Leith to Mrs. Brand (Ruth Roman). Of course, they need no introduction, as Mrs. Brand had a relationship with Leith before marrying Brand, one that Leith broke off. But for whatever reason, Maj. Brand is pissed about it, probably because his wife still holds a candle for Leith. So there's going to be a lot more tension between Leith and Brand.

The men parachute in behind the lines and reach their assigned target. Unsurprisingly, the place is well-guarded enough that the commandos aren't going to be able to get those documents unmolested. And wouldn't you know it, one of the German guards spots the interlopers and attacks. Brand finds himself unable to kill the enemy, being too much of a coward to kill at close range, leaving Leith to do the deed. No wonder nobody has any respect for Brand.

The commandos head out into the desert toward where they're supposed to rendezvous with the people who are going to provide them with the camels they need to get the rest of the way out of the desert. However, along the way they spot a German patrol and get into a firefight with them, killing several but also leaving a British solder and a German officer seriously wounded. Brand, being in command, comes up with the brilliant idea of leaving Leith behind with the two wounded men since they can't just leave a British soldier to die alone. It also has the added benefit in Brand's mind that it will probably kill Leith too, and Leith won't be able to report back to Cairo how much of a coward Brand was.

It doesn't quite work out that way, as Leith decides the least bad thing to do is to put both wounded men out of their misery. The two wounded do ultimately die out there in the desert, leaving Leith free to leave the scene and catch up with Brand. Boy can you bet there's going to be a lot of tension once Leith shows up again, and even more when they discover the people provisioning the camels have been found out and killed, leaving just one camel for the men.

You'll have to watch the rest of Bright Victory to see how the conflict between Leith and Brand is resolved. It's an interesting movie in that it's more of a thoughtful movie than a war movie of action. Casting a German in Jürgens as an Allied officer (he's passed off as South African, presumably an Afrikaner) seems odd, but works because he gives a good performance. I'm not the biggest fan of Richard Burton, but he doesn't do anything to make the movie worse. Roman only gets a couple of scenes, while the commandos include a very young Christopher Lee whom I didn't recognize at first.

Much of the filming was done on location in Libya; this was a dozen years before Qaddafi came to power. The rest was done in France. Although the print TCM ran has a Columbia logo at the beginning, the movie was made by a comapny called Transcontinental Films based in France with Columbia getting distribution rights in the English-speaking world. Apparently there were cuts made for the original release (there are a couple of scenes I can understand censors being unhappy with), but the print TCM ran and the one on the box set are both around 102 minutes which, as I understand it, was the original pre-cut running time.

People who want a war movie with less action will probably enjoy Bitter Victory, but be aware that it's also a bit of an acquired taste.

Airport '77

Some time back I bought the box set of the four Airport movies. Having done reviews of Airport and Airport '75, it's now time for the third movie in the series, Airport '77.

James Stewart plays Philip Stevens, an extremely wealthy businessman who is taking some of the fine art that he owns and has stored up north, and opening a museum down in Palm Beach, FL. Not only that, but he's inviting a galaxy of VIPs to the opening of the museum and flying both them and the artwork in on his lavishly appointed private 747. Christopher Lee plays businessman Martin Wallace, married to nasty Karen (Lee Grant); Olivia de Havilland and Joseph Cotten are a pair of elegant passengers who last met in London in 1936; Capt. Don Gallagher (Jack Lemmon) is the pilot; and Eve (Brenda Vaccare) is his girlfriend.

Anyhow, with all those rich folks and artwork on the plane, you know it's going to attract people who want to steal the stuff. This time, there's an inside plot involving to co-pilot Chambers (Robert Foxworth). They install some anesthetic gas that they'll be able to run through the ventilation system (they, of course, will be wearing gas masks), knocking the passengers out, and enabling Chambers and his men to fly the plane to a small abandoned airfield in the Bahamas where the paintings will be unloaded.

Or, at least, that's the plan, and it's one that doesn't quite go the way the bad guys had it figured out. After knocking the passengers out, they have to fly low in order to evade radar detection, and when they get into a fog bank, they find an oil platform sticking up out of the ocean at a height where they could run into it. Ultimately, they clip a wing, and are unable to correct out of this, resulting in the plane crashing into the ocean and sinking to the bottom.

Thankfully for the passengers, the bottom isn't so deep that the water pressure would crush the fuselage. That's the one piece of good news they have when they wake up. Well, the other one is that the hijackers are either dead or severely injured so they don't have to worry about that. However, they do have to worry about the panicking passengers; the ticking time bomb of being underwater; and the fact that they're off course so rescue crews don't know where to look. To save the plane, Capt. Gallagher and scuba diver Wallace are going to have to get a dinghy with a rescue beacon to the surface.

Airport '77 is a worthy entry in the disaster genre. It's entertaining, if not particularly great. Still, seeing all the grand old stars together with some then-new ones is always fun. Stewart is underused and given a boring role, almost as if he came in for one or two days to film all of his scenes. Lemmon is surprisingly interesting in a sort of role he never really essayed before. De Havilland and Cotten are nice throwbacks, and Lee Grant is a hoot.

As for the plot, sure it's full of holes and unrealistic, but a movie like this you watch for the stars and the disaster, and in that regard both of them come through. I can certainly recommend Airport '77.