The Three Musketeers is full of action, dash, and slapstick, and it depressed me very much. This is Richard Lester's first picture since The Bed Sitting Room (1969), a picture that showed a sad lapse in Lester's judgment of scripts though not in his unique and wonderful filmic style. The Three Musketeers has a sounder script, but it shows an absolute abandonment of the style that made Lester Lester. Such films as A Hard Day's Night and The Knack and How I Won the War overflow with imaginative pyrotechnics that manage to be brilliant and helpful at the same time. The Three Musketeers overflows with nothing but what must in Lester's case be called conventional ebullience. It tries to render the Dumas novel as action comedy and, if memory is serving, it takes that vein somewhat further than the Doublas Fairbanks version did. Here it's not only D'Artagnan who...