Director George Sidney is known mainly for: (1) glamourizing women, and (2) showing the audience a good time. In The Three Musketeers (1948), he does both.
The principal woman glamourized is Lana Turner as the treacherous Milady de Winter. June Allyson, Marie Windsor, Patricia Medina, and Angela Lansbury also get the Sidney treatment in smaller roles. The three-strip MGM Technicolor is simply awesome (cinematography by Robert Planck).
My favorite adaptation of this story is still Richard Lester’s drenched-in-historical-verisimilitude two-part version, The Three Musketeers (1974) and The Four Musketeers (1975). Sidney’s version is comparatively compressed, the events of Lester’s Three Musketeers all taking place within the Sidney version’s first hour.
Gene Kelly, as the Sidney version’s D’Artagnan, makes an effectively athletic swashbuckler, but the best part is the juicy villainy provided by Lana Turner and Vincent Price. Turner’s femme fatale is pure evil. Price’s Cardinal Richelieu, on the other hand, has at least one redeeming quality. He likes cats!
