The Three Musketeers (1948), dir. George Sidney. Streaming at home, Wednesday, June 14.

Considering how much I’ve read about Singin’ in the Rain, you’d think I’d have known that the scenes of The Royal Rascal, the movie-within-the-movie at the beginning, were taken from the 1948 flick Three Musketeers, starring Kelly, four years younger. You can see him perform his derring-do on the stairs in black in white in Singin’, or in weird, washed-out Technicolor in the MGM film based on the Dumas novel.

The Three Musketeers is a weird as hell film, one half of which is a delightful and athletic romp through 17th Century France, a France that appears as though it was shot in Louis B. Mayer’s enormous backyard. It’s wonderfully ludicrous, with a bunch of drinking and swordplay and jokes and buffoonery, and the charisma between the musketeers and Kelly’s d’Artagnan is palpable. Then, at about the halfway mark, it becomes less-than-wonderfully ludicrous as the plot complicates in ways that only work in the Dumas novel but not in any other way, and then finally, in the last thirty minutes, it devolves into being annoyingly ludicrous as it becomes suddenly serious and you wonder “what? I’m supposed to care now?”

It makes no sense whatsoever to summarize the plot, such as it is, considering in the book it was likely meant to ram you through each chapter in ways that only Alexandre Dumas could do–I’ve never read The Three Musketeers, but was given a copy of the 1,200+ page Count of Monte Cristo one holiday and thought “ah, well, this’ll go on the shelf”. I decided to just read the first few pages and on that Christmas evening had finished 200 pages, and by the end of the week had read the whole damn thing. That book’s plot is insane and yet works perfectly, and I’m guessing Dumas pulls off the same trick in Musketeers.

Basically, there’s the King of France (the Wizard himself, Frank Morgan) who is completely ineffective, and there’s Richelieu (Vincent Price)–who is only “Richelieu” and not “Cardinal Richelieu”, as he was in life, because MGM wanted that Catholic money–the evil genius who is taking control of France from the king. There’s the wicked Countess de Winter (Lana Turner) who plots and schemes and clearly is a tool used by Richelieu, but for some reason the screenwriters loathed women and made her the most terrible of all villains. Which makes no sense. Angela Lansbury is on hand as the Queen, and she’s only made use of in a subplot that also doesn’t make any sense but involves diamonds and an an affair with the Prime Minister of England (!) and if she’s exposed it’ll somehow ruin the king but it’s not exposed, so… victory? I still don’t get it.

The Three Musketeers works at the start when we see that these four rowdy men, the three musketeers of the title–Athos (Van Heflin), Porthos (Gig Young) and Aramis (Robert Coote)–and Kelly’s d’Artagnan (who isn’t yet a musketeer, hence Three Musketeers), fight and drink and carouse. At times, they’re outright awful in ways that are actually disturbing. d’Artagnan’s drab love interest, Constance Bonacieux (June Allyson), is the daughter of his landlord. Upon moving into an the apartment, her father, the beleaguered landlord, begs the musketeers to protect his Constance, because she’s loyal to the Queen and he worries that Richelieu’s men will harm her for this. Seems reasonable. Actually, perfectly reasonable, and we settle in to watch them do just that, right? No, because they think him a spy and throw him down a long flight of stone steps, a scene so disturbing both Janice and I gasped. Well, in short order we see he’s not a spy at all, and, in fact, Kelly goes on to marry this girl and tries to protect her (they do an awful job of this, as we shall see). We never see the poor man again.

OK, sure. Well, as noted there’s a ton of derring-do, Kelly is superbly athletic and grinning his ridiculous Singin’ in the Rain grin, and all seems well. Unfortunately, Vincent Price is putting in the same subtle performance he did in Laura, when he needs to be chewing his lines like he did later in Witchfinder General. A plot must be affixed to this rambling story, and, as noted, it’s awful, confusing and outright stupid, involving diamonds.

To make matters worse, that plot is resolved about halfway through the picture. Now comes the serious part, only we didn’t know that was coming, so we were left wondering why the film stopped being funny or interesting and was suddenly straightforward and, at times, mean. For starters, it begins to focus on Countess de Winter, who is used by Richelieu to seduce a man named Birmingham, that Prime Minister of England. Turns out, she was also once married to Athos. Then Gene Kelly’s character sees her and wants to sleep with her, as well, going so far as to make a fool of her, so that now she wants him dead. Um, OK. Soon we she that is the embodiment of evil, despite the fact that, in life and even in the course of the film, Richelieu is drastically more awful and powerful.

It doesn’t help that the Countess is played by Lana Turner, who is very effective in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Imitation of Life, and that’s it. She seems like the femme fatale from a crime film here, and, in a way, that’s what she is. In a profoundly stupid scene, she is arrested in England and, for reasons I still can’t grasp, the prime minister, Birmingham, asks Constance to watch over the Countess, believing that she (the Countess) wouldn’t be able to seduce Constance, since she (Constance) is not a man.

But Constance, the maiden to the Queen, lover and soon to be wife of d’Artagnan (please forget that he just minutes ago wanted to shag the Countess), a person profoundly gullible and seemingly incapable of getting into a dress in the morning, somehow is asked to watch over a woman that everyone agrees is dastardly, cunning, and dangerous. Sure enough, the Countess pretends she’s sick, refuses medical care (which would expose that she’s not), and weeps over the indignity of being hanged in common noose used for the lowliest criminals. She convinces Constance to bring her a knife so she can commit suicide instead of facing such horrors. Constance, ever the moron, does, and she’s murdered, along with a guard, and then the Prime Minister. What the fuck was the guard, with his sword and huge pike, doing that he couldn’t stop this woman with what appears to be a steak knife?

The Musketeers catch up with the Countess, horrified at what has transpired, and they send her to a village executioner, who chops her head off as Athos tearfully watches on. Later, the Musketeers and d’Artagnan are rewarded by Richelieu, who has been tricked into having to pardon our heroes. Seeing this, he becomes friendly and they all have a right old laugh together. This film actually closes with Richelieu a seemingly better person, but the Countess got her evil female head chopped off. What the fuck, dudes.

The Three Musketeers succeeded in making me want to read the book soon, especially since I doubt they actually took much from it to make this half-dreadful romp. But I can’t recall a film so dedicated to fun and silliness twisting into a movie of fake despair and supposed tragedy. I did, however, get a big laugh watching, in color, The Royal Rascal, if only for a moment. I sure missed Lena Lamont.