Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, June Allyson, Van Heflin, Angela Lansbury
Release Year: 1948
Country: US
Run Time: 126 minutes
Plot
The third talkie version of Dumas' The Three Musketeers, this splashy MGM adaptation is also the first version in Technicolor. Gene Kelly romps his way through the role of D'Artagnan, the upstart cadet who joins veteran Musketeers Athos (Van Heflin), Porthos (Gig Young) and Aramis (Robert Coote) in their efforts to save their beloved Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury) from disgrace. They are aided in their efforts by the lovely and loyal Constance (June Allyson), while the villainy is in the capable hands of Milady De Winter (Lana Turner) and Richelieu (Vincent Price). Notice we don't say Cardinal Richelieu: anxious not to offend anyone, MGM removed the religious angle from the Cardinal's character. While early sound versions of Three Musketeers eliminated the deaths of Constance and Milady, this adaptation telescopes the novel's events to allow for these tragedies. True to form, MGM saw to it that Lana Turner, as Milady, was dressed to the nines and heavily bejeweled for her beheading sequence. Portions of the 1948 Three Musketeers, in black and white, showed up in the silent film-within-a-film in 1952's Singin' in the Rain, which of course also starred Gene Kelly. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
"He left Satan with an angel," Athos (Van Heflin) says of John Sutton's Buckingham two-thirds of the way through this fanciful Technicolor version of The Three Musketeers. The angel is of course June Allyson's demure Constance Bonacieux and the evil one a lusciously gowned Mylady de Winter, alias Lana Turner, and from that moment on M-G-M's rather lighthearted version of Alexandre Dumas's classic swashbuckler takes on a rather ominous tone. Reviewers and audiences alike have quibbled about the casting of this colorful mix of burlesque and melodrama ever since it was released back in 1948 but although Gene Kelly tries too hard at times and Miss Turner perhaps fails to sustain her glamorous mystique for the duration, The Three Msuketeers remains an outrageously entertaining yarn, the Southern California locales perfectly standing in for 17th Century France and England. With the nimble Kelly at the helm, the sword fights take on an almost operatic intensity and stunt riders take care of the rest. The end result is a classic swashbuckler in the finest sense of the word and certainly far superior to the otherwise much vaunted 1973 version. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
Malcolm Brown - Art Director, Cedric Gibbons - Art Director, Walter Plunkett - Costume Designer, George Sidney - Director, George Boemler - Editor, Robert J. Kern - Editor, Herbert Stothart - Composer (Music Score), Charles Previn - Musical Direction/Supervision, Jack Dawn - Makeup, Henry W. Grace - Production Designer, Edwin B. Willis - Production Designer, Robert Planck - Cinematographer, Pandro S. Berman - Producer, Henry W. Grace - Set Designer, Edwin B. Willis - Set Designer, Warren Newcombe - Special Effects, Robert Ardrey - Screenwriter, Pyotr Tchaikovsky - Featured Music, Alexandre Dumas - Book Author
