1974 - THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, aka The Revenge of Milady

The conclusion of The Three Musketeers story directed by Richard Lester.  The original film The Three Musketeers was clearly intended as an epic film with a lengthy running time however for what ever reason the producers split the film in two and re titled the remaining film The Four Musketeers much to the annoyance of the actors who thought they were only signing on for one film.

The conclusion of the story more or less follows the plot of the Alexandre Dumas book which frankly is kind of depressing.  Milady De Winter played by Faye Dunaway schemes to get her revenge on the Musketeers for defeating her plans during the first film.  All the expected sword fights and the Richard Lester slapstick touches are here but overall the fun and hi jinks of the first film are missing.  Frankly this film is kind of a downer. I recall one critic at the time speculating that the splitting of the original film was deliberate because all of the fun stuff was in the first film.

 

There are compensations viewing this film.  The all star cast is fun.  The cinematography of David Watkin  looks great and the overall production is impressive with lots of on location filming in Spain.  

 

Thia film was a commercial success.  It gave Richard Lester the hit film he needed although his later films never seemed to live up to his earlier films.  Lester and most of the cast reunited for a sequel in 1989 called The Return of the Musketeers, but it was a disappointing rehash of the earlier films.

Written by George MacDonald Fraiser, the runing time is 108 minutes.

1984 - FINDERS KEEPERS, disappointing comedy from Richard Lester

The gem of a decent comedy is kicking around somewhere in this disappointing film from Richard Lester.  Michael O'Keefe is a con man on the run from an Oakland, California sheriff. He's slept with the sheriff's wife and the sheriff is out for blood.  O'Keefe also gets mixed up with a couple of thieves who have stolen five million dollars and are transporting it by train in a coffin.  On board the train is Beverly D'Angelo ( with really big hair) as a would be actress with mental problems, David Wayne is an ancient conductor and Louis Gossett Jr. plays a friend of O'Keefe's who just happens to be another conman.

With all the complex character relationships and comedic situations this film should have been a lot funnier than it was.  The actors all seem to want to go for it, but Lester keeps everything clamped down not allowing the actors or the comedic scenes to develop their full potential.

Finders Keepers is Richard Lester in the later part of his career,  The one time innovator of madcap fims like A Hard Day's Night, Help, The Knack …and How to Get It and the drama Petulia seemed to have lost his touch.  Lester hadn't really made an interesting film since Superman II and a good portion of that film had been shot by Richard Donner until he was fired and replaced by Lester.  It seemed like time had finally made his 1960's anarchic comedy style obsolete. 

It's to bad because some of the comedic situations in the script are actually very clever.  After all how many films have you watched that has a scene with a runaway house.  Jim Carrey shows up in what was a very early role for him and I'll say he's consistent, he plays the same obnoxious character at the beginning of his career that he's played throughout his entire acting career.

The film was written by Charles Dennis, Ronny Graham and Terence Marsh.  The running time is 96 minutes.

1973 - THE THREE MUSKETEERS, large scale production of this often told story

The director Richard Lester who had not exactly been hitting it out of the box office park with his recent films was hired by the producer Ilya Salkind to film a large scale version of that old war horse of a story The Three Musketeers.  Lester signed on for this film and brought his usual bag of cinematic tricks with him. Lester was known for adding comedic touches and slapstick scenes throughout his films along with a kind of a frenzied editing style. Viewed today, Lester's films are in many ways period pieces of a certain film making style of the 1960's and 1970's.

You have to give the producers of this film credit, no expense was spared. On location filming was in Spain and the stunning photography came from a frequent Lester contributor David Watkin.  Watkin gave the film a beautiful glowing look.  The action scenes in The Three Musketeers were staged by a fencing master named William Hobbs.  Hobbs toughened up the sword fights with an anything goes approach to the fencing instead of the usual gentlemanly rules found in those old Tyrone Power and Erroll Flynn movies. The Musketeers just don't fight with swords, they kick, hit and at times bite their opponents.

The interesting cast was a mixture of British and American actors, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee in yet another villain role and Faye Dunaway as the evil Milady de Winter.  Raquel Welch was hired to bring more sex appeal to the film as the love interest of Michael York.  However Richard Lester got the inspired idea to have her play her part like a complete fool,  Welch is the victim of most of Lester's goofy gags as she is constantly getting knocked over or thrown around like a punching bag.  Needless to say the critics proclaimed Welch a comedic genius although it was all Lester's doing.

 

The Three Musketeers is an entertaining spectacle and it is also notorious as the film that the producer decided to split into two parts from it's original lengthy running time.  It's safe to say the actors were not amused by this since they had only signed up to act in one film not two.   Needless to say it was bring out the lawyers time when the second film now called The Four Musketeers was released.

The Three Musketeers looks great in it's Blu-Ray presentation and to give credit where credit is due Richard Lester did a very good job freshening up a story that had already been told many times.

George MacDonald Frasier wrote the screenplay the running time is 105 minutes.

1975 - ROYAL FLASH, Richard Lester returns to the swashbuckler

Panned by the critics upon the release and ignored by the audience, Royal Flash does have a lot of the old Richard Lester touch at times.  The screenplay was by the writer of the Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser.  Fraser's clever idea was to create a character who was for the most part a coward and a complete "cad" as they liked to say in Merry Old England and stick him in world changing situations like the American Civil War or in this case the political maneuvering of Otto Von Bismark.

Lester appeared to be aware that audiences would think he was making another version of The Three Musketeers, so he worked hard to find a new spin of the swashbuckler genre.  The cast was certainly interesting, Malcolm McDowell mister intense in films like If and A Clockwork Orange is the cowardly Harry Flashman, Florinda Balkin is the famous and real life prostitute Lola Montes and Oliver Reed is Otto Von Bismark.

 

There are lots of great British character actors throughout the film, Michael Hordern, Lionel Jeffries, Britt Eckland and Alister Sim to name a few.  Jeffries is particularly amusing.

The plot of the film borrows liberally from The Prisoner of Zenda to which Lester adds a lot of his famous visual gags. The film is funny if maybe a little slow at times but it is entertaining.

Running time 102 minutes.

1965 - HELP, the 2nd Beatles film.

 For the 2nd Beatles film the director Richard Lester abandoned any idea of a plot and instead went for a series of comic vignettes.  What story there is involves a Eastern cult chasing Ringo around for a sacrificial ring.  At this point in his career Lester was at his peak when it came to madcap comedy.  To cover the very thin premise of the film Lester throws in about every comic idea that he can think of. After a while the film got a little exhausting,  I wanted to finally say "wrap it up." 

The Beatles are portrayed as a very nice bunch of guys not adverse to having a few beers at a London pub.  They are actually extremely likable and have a nice screen presence.  Lester was smart enough to surround them with some very funny performers, Leo McKern, Eleanor Bron, Roy Kinnear (who was in about every Lester film), and Victor Spinetti.  This helps the film a whole lot.

 

Probably the chief selling point of the film are the songs which the Beatles wrote for the film, amazingly they are all classic Beatles songs.  The presentation of the songs uses a lot of jump cutting and wild staging something that was almost a forerunner of the modern music video.

 

The film was written by Marc Behm and Charles Wood. It runs 92 minutes

1983 - SUPERMAN III, pretty bad

Christopher Reeve who did well in the first two Superman movies but he  really got taken to town when a 3rd film was produced.  

Richard Pryor had made it known he wanted to be in a Superman film, so a part was tailored for him.  It just completely threw the whole film off.  Pryor's humor just seemed out of place for a super hero film and it wasn't particularly funny to begin with.

The director was Richard Lester who was definitely on the downside of his career.  Lester was known for fitting anarchic sight gags in his films but he seems to have lost his touch.  The gags are still here but they just aren't funny.  It seemed like Lester was just going through the motions in this film.

The special effects which seemed so good in the first Reeve movie now look kind of crappy and the bottom line was that whole thing just turned out to be an unfunny mess.  Superman III is a warning sign to people who make these kinds of films.  There is a fine line between sincerity and camp with these kinds of films.

125 minutes, written by David and Leslie Newman.

1980 - SUPERMAN II, the sequel

The further adventures of "The Man of Steel" who in this film seems more like "The Man of Aluminum."  This time Superman must face down three villains from Krypton the old home planet in a big free for all fight in Metropolis.

Time has really dated the special effects in this film.  The flying sequences look very cheesy and the big destruction sequences are mostly models and miniatures not matching up very well with the actual sequences

Let's face it the character of Superman had always been kind of boring, so to keep the film interesting the villains get most of the good scenes.  After a while even they start to look a little boring as well, there are only so many push the "puny humans" scenes around that can be made interesting.

The director was Richard Lester who replaced the original director Richard Donner,  Lester had started off his career with frantic slapstick films, but his inventiveness had started to peter out in the late 70's.  Lester's slap stick scenes would seem to be perfect for a comic book film, but everything seems kind of flat and out of it as he goes through the motions.

Probably Gene Hackman still comes off best as Lex Luthor, hamming it up with the right mix of comic book movie bad guyness.

127 minutes

1974 - JUGGERNAUT, classy British disaster film is a little too sophisticated for it's own good.

A mad bomber has planted a bunch of bombs on a luxury liner heading for New York  It's up to Richard Harris and his bomb disposal crew to parachute into the ocean and disarm these bombs of course.

This is a very well made and interesting film.  The director Richard Lester filmed on an actual ship much like Andrew Stone did for The Last Voyage.  Lester put together a very good cast of actors and managed to get decent performances out of all of them.  Harris is his usual flamboyant self, Omar Sharif effectively underplays his part as the Captain, and Anthony Hopkins as the Scotland Yard detective actually keeps the facial ticks and quirks under control for a change. 

The big problem with Juggernaut is that it is not The Poseidon Adventure it is too classy and polished for the film crowd that gravitates to the goofy disaster genre.  All the cliches are present in Juggernaut like the little kid in danger, the detective whose wife is on board the ship etc.  What Lester does with these cliches is to underplay them which makes for an interesting approach to the film, however it also kind of saps all the corny melodrama out of the story which is one of the major reasons for watching disaster movies.  

Written by Richard Allen Simmons and Alan Plater, the running time is 109 minutes.

Ultimately Juggernaut is a somewhat unsatisfactory film.  Richard Lester made a good film but his desire to upgrade the genre took away most of the entertainment value of the story.

109 minutes.