Word: dunaway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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AFTER FIVE MINUTES of The Three Musketeers my notebook was on the floor, by the popcorn boxes. What could I write? That Michael York and Faye Dunaway look nice? That the 17th century street scenes look like Hogarths or something? What can you do with a film which manages to make Raquel Welch goofy and charming? How can a movie where Charlton Heston glides around as a hunched Cardinal Richelieu keep anyone scrawling critical notations in the dark? Objecting to Richard Lester's Musketeers for being a little flabby and shallow would be like condemning another of Lester's pictures...
...musketeers-Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Michael York as D'Artagnan-all perform admirably. When the casting threatens to become too capricious (Raquel Welch as the Queen's confidante, Faye Dunaway as the archvillainess, Charlton Heston as Richelieu), Lester exploits the absurdity. He made the discovery, for example, that Welch and Dunaway, for all their physical dissimilarity, are basically the same actress. So a climactic brawl between them is funny not just for itself but because of the two people playing them...
...John Adams and John Kennedy among its members, Harvard's Hasty Pudding is proudly behind the times. The annual high spot, a transvestite revue replete with high-kicking chorus boys, is garnished with a "Hasty Pudding Woman-of-the-Year Award." This year the honors went to Faye Dunaway, 33, hailed as "the most explosive package of beautiful talent to have hit the stage and screen in years." Faye, whose only sizable screen detonation occurred in 1967 when she starred in Bonnie and Clyde, enjoyed the Cambridge ceremonies: a Faye Dunaway look-alike contest, won by a platinum-wigged...
...Three Musketeers, grimacing from the pain, was it because she was smarting from Producer Ilya Salkind's remark, "Raquel is very big in all the small countries"? Or was she simply making sure of getting attention in an all-star cast that includes Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin and Michael York? Filming was halted briefly to determine that Raquel, who plays the heroine, had only sprained her arm. No strategic areas were damaged...
...walking through a standardized part, Scott has enough natural presence to compel an audience's attention, and it is always pleasant to see Palance doing his thing as an oily heavy, though no one will ever accuse him of being an actor who has grown with the years. Dunaway, however, is inadequate, and Mills is stray-sheepish. In the end, one is reduced to admiring the scenery while puzzling over the disparity between the film's slick physical production and smoothed-down dramatic style, and the historical moment it purports to examine: a time that was down...