The Three Musketeers (1974)

Film: The Three Musketeers (1974)

Stars: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch

Director: Richard Lester

Oscar History: No nominations, though Welch won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, so it's possible she was close?

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said last week, Raquel Welch's career after Myra Breckinridge never really recovered-she was never able to properly transition away from sex comedies, or roles that traded on her beauty (and curvy figure) in a comic or exploitive way.  That being said, Welch was a star in major studio films throughout the 1970's, and what is generally considered to be one of her best roles (and best films) of that era was The Three Musketeers, a retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, though told with more comedic elements than you'd generally expect from this story.  The film is an ensemble & star-studded, and while Welch is one of the lead characters, she's not one of the most important, a testament to Welch's inability to land solo roles in films that might have elevated her beyond her plastic screen persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie actually sticks pretty closely to the novel, though it only tells half of the story (the movie was followed by The Four Musketeers, and then many years later The Return of the Musketeers, a film that resulted in the tragic death of one of its stars, though that's a story for a different day).  We have young, naive d'Artagnan (York), starting from his humble beginnings in hopes of someday becoming one of the king's musketeers.  After inadvertently challenging all of the three musketeers (Reed, Finlay & Chamberlain) to duels, they start out on adventure to try to stop Cardinal Richelieu (Heston), who is undermining the Queen (Chaplin), who is having an affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Ward).  Despite the Cardinal and his accomplice Milady de Winter's (Dunaway) intentions, the Musketeers (including d'Artagnan) & the Queen's dressmaker (Welch) are able to help the Queen save face, and hide her affair from the King...though we get over the closing credits an indication that there will be more mad adventures with those involved.

The film is more fun than it should be.  The script is meandering, the characters are all two-dimensional, but Richard Lester (who made several films with the Beatles, who at one point were intended to star in this film), knows how to craft comedy, and the action sequences are played for maximum effect.  No one in the film is giving a great performance, but everyone is game.  We see several actors (Welch, Dunaway, & Heston specifically) totally trade on their real-world personas for maximum comedic effect, and the central story around the Queen trying to hide her affair works.  This was a hit for a reason-it's mindless, but pleasant fun.

The movie has a weird place in Hollywood history that I'd be remiss not to mention.  If you watch the movie in its original cut (as I did) you'll notice a preview to the sequel over the end credits.  This was something that films occasionally did at the time (we saw that during our month devoted to Nancy Kwan with The Wrecking Crew advertising a sequel that never came out).  However, this was unusual because the actors involved didn't know they'd made a sequel; the two movies were intended to be one four-hour epic, and the stars of the film only found out that they'd made two movies for Fox when they attended the premiere.  This was technically legal at the time-there were no guarantees that a studio couldn't do something like this, but the stars (who were only paid for one movie) were enraged, and eventually there was a union clause set out by SAG that actors had to be informed how many movies they were being asked to film prior to the release of a film.

Welch won a Golden Globe for this film, and is fun in it.  This is not stretching for her-we see men fall over themselves, including Michael York, trying to bed her in the movie, but at least she feels like she's in on the joke here.  The movie would not, however, win her an Oscar nomination like we saw for Ann-Margret.  The competition was fierce in 1974 (a legendarily good lineup by AMPAS), and had one of those women left, my gut says that Liv Ullmann in Abdication would've bested Welch for this slot (Ullman was deemed ineligible for her seismic performance in Scenes from a Marriage, and considering the hubbub Oscar might've wanted to go with her for literally any performance as a way to acknowledge her work).  

This was the only time in Welch's career she came close to a nomination.  She would continue making bad (but sometimes successful) sex comedies or action-adventures for the remainder of the decade, until the troubled production of Cannery Row cost her her career.  Welch was accused of diva-like behavior on the set, causing the studio to dump her as its lead, and instead cast (the younger) Debra Winger.  Welch sued, and would win over $10 million in the lawsuit for breach-of-contract, but this essentially ended her career.  No one sues the powers-that-be in Hollywood & gets away with it, and while Welch would do television & theater throughout the decade, she'd make no feature films between 1977 and 1994, and even after that her work was simply in cameo roles.  She'd make tons of money on beauty & health products (at 80-years-of-age, Welch still is fashionable & looks decades younger), but her time as a movie star was over.

And with that, the traditional film sex symbol also seemed to fade.  Welch was the last real star of that mold-the kind of buxom, sex goddess role-that had a sustainable career in film.  Some blips on the screen like Bo Derek or Megan Fox popped up, but they disappeared just as quickly.  Television became a much more lucrative spot for these types of stars (think of Farrah Fawcett or eventually the quintessential TV sex bomb, Pamela Anderson), as did modeling, pop music, & reality television.  The only star that comes close to the heyday of sex symbols in the modern era is Jennifer Lopez, who really treads the line between music & movies in a way none of her predecessors would've had to.  We will start a new theme, and a new year of Stars next Saturday, but before then we'll take a look back at what we've seen this season tomorrow as we close out our year devoted to Classic Hollywood sex symbols.