A classic swashbuckling take on the Alexandre Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers is an exhilarating ride. Gene Kelley has a field day with all the athletic swordplay and derring-do. Director George Sidney makes it a rousing, light-hearted, romp in sumptuous technicolor. With Vincent Price, Van Heflin, Lana Turner, Angela Lansbury, and June Allyson, how could you go wrong? This was Lana Turner’s first color feature, although she didn’t want to do it. After a suspension and some convincing, along with a stronger rewrite for her character (Countess de Winter), she joined in the fun. According to TCM’s notes, Robert Taylor, Ricardo Montalban, and Sidney Greenstreet were set to play the three musketeers at some point before the final cast was set. Due to a broken ankle, Kelly did his fencing scenes toward the end of filming. All told, it was a money-maker for MGM.
This is the separate Publicity and Exploitation section of the main pressbook, of which I’ll post soon. As usual with MGM pressbooks, it was printed on newspaper sheets, one-sided, so I’ve raised the white balance to approximate how it looked before age and acidity set in.
