The Three Musketeers gave Douglas Fairbanks his most famous literary hero: D’Artagnan, a young Gascon who joins Athos, Porthos and Aramis in a tale of honour, intrigue and swordplay.
The Three Musketeers (1921), directed by Fred Niblo and based on Alexandre Dumas’s novel, stars Fairbanks as D’Artagnan, who travels to Paris to become a musketeer and becomes entangled in the plots of Cardinal Richelieu. The film’s duels, chases and court intrigue gave Fairbanks a grander stage than Zorro.
Fairbanks’s D’Artagnan is youthful, impetuous and irresistibly confident, and his fencing scenes are among the most celebrated of the silent era. He plays the hero’s growth from eager provincial to trusted musketeer with a lightness that keeps the long story moving.
It is a signature role because it confirmed Fairbanks as the leading swashbuckler of his generation, and because D’Artagnan’s motto, all for one and one for all, became inseparable from Fairbanks’s own screen image.