The Four Musketeers (1974)

Whilst it's not quite as good as last year's effort, Richard Lester has managed to reassemble the cast for another romp through Alexandre Dumas' stories of derring-do at the court of King Louis XIII (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Now following his near miss last time, Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) has become even more fixated on exposing the Queen (Geraldine Chaplin) and her British lover Buckingham (Simon Ward) and so has commissioned "Rochefort" (Christopher Lee) and the menacing "Lady De Winter" (Faye Dunaway) to get the secrets from dressmaker "Constance" (Raquel Welch). Meantime, the loved-up "D'Artagnan" - the particularly scrawny Michael York - is also on her trail, aided by his three colleagues "Porthos" (Frank Finlay), "Aramis" (Richard Chamberlain) and "Athos" (Oliver Reed) and adventures ensue as they have to thwart the evil Cardinal's machinations and save poor "Constance" from the malevolent "Milady". It's colourful and action packed, with more from the others - especially the clearly in his element Reed who must have been swilling real vin rouge. Roy Kinnear rolls his eyes in disbelief with comic aplomb and we have quite a fun game of cricket that's far more explosive than any I've ever seen at Lords! Dunaway is great as the manipulatrix and Welch likewise as the naive young seamstress only just fitting into one of her own frocks. Heston features a little too sparingly to make much of an impact, but Christopher Lee delivers well too - his firing squad "perhaps I'll die of old age" did make me smile - as this enjoyable costume drama heads to it's rather fitting, but slightly disappointing, denouement. These are a good pair of films for fans of action comedies, and still bear watching fifty years later.