Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu | Directed by Richard Lester | 1973
Charlton Heston spent most of his career playing heroes, so it is a particular pleasure to watch him play a villain — and to watch him do it without winking, scenery-chewing, or any of the usual tricks. In Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973), Heston plays Cardinal Richelieu, the powerful chief minister of France who secretly rules the kingdom while King Louis XIII reigns in name only. It is a supporting role, not a leading one, but Heston makes it one of the film’s anchors: cold, intelligent, amused, and utterly convinced that his scheming serves the state. In a film full of swashbuckling energy, he provides the still centre around which the intrigue turns.
The film adapts the first part of Alexandre Dumas’s beloved 1844 novel, with a screenplay by George MacDonald Fraser. Young d’Artagnan, played by Michael York, arrives in Paris hoping to become a King’s Musketeer and quickly befriends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, played by Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain. Together they become entangled in a court conspiracy: Queen Anne, played by Geraldine Chaplin, has given a set of diamond studs — a gift from the King — to her lover, the Duke of Buckingham, played by Simon Ward. Richelieu, learning of the gift, persuades the King to demand that the Queen wear the diamonds at a grand ball, knowing she cannot produce them. The Musketeers must race to England and back to recover the jewels before Richelieu can expose the Queen and provoke a war.
What Lester does brilliantly is to treat Dumas not as a museum piece but as a living, muddy, funny world. His Paris is not a polished studio set; it is crowded, dirty, and full of brawls, drunks, and practical jokes. The sword fights are clumsy as often as they are elegant, the heroes fall over as often as they triumph, and the humour is broad without ever becoming parody. Into this boisterous world steps Heston’s Richelieu, and the contrast is the point. While everyone else is shouting, drinking, and duelling, Richelieu speaks quietly, watches carefully, and lets others do the violent work for him. His agents — Milady de Winter, played with icy glamour by Faye Dunaway, and the Comte de Rochefort, played by Christopher Lee — are extensions of his will, and Heston plays him as a man who never needs to raise his voice because he already holds the levers of power.
This restraint is what makes the performance so memorable. Many screen Richelieus have been pantomime villains, twirling moustaches and cackling over plots. Heston’s is closer to Dumas’s original conception: a statesman who genuinely believes that France needs a strong hand, even if that hand must sometimes act ruthlessly. When he smiles, it is the smile of a man who has already calculated three moves ahead. When he is thwarted — as he is, in the end, when d’Artagnan returns with the diamonds — he does not rage. He simply adapts, and even rewards d’Artagnan with a commission, recognising talent that might one day be useful. It is a wonderfully grown-up piece of villainy, and it shows Heston’s range in a way his heroic roles sometimes did not: he could play intelligence as convincingly as he could play courage.
The production itself is a story worth telling. Lester shot so much material that the film was split into two releases: The Three Musketeers in 1973 and The Four Musketeers in 1974, a decision that led to legal disputes with the cast but gave audiences two films for the price of one long shoot. The cast is a roll call of 1970s talent — Raquel Welch as Constance, Jean-Pierre Cassel as the King, Spike Milligan as her husband — and the locations in Spain, standing in for seventeenth-century France, give the film a sunlit, authentic texture that studio backlots could never match. Michel Legrand’s score, David Watkin’s cinematography, and Fraser’s witty, literate dialogue all contribute to a film that feels both faithful to Dumas and fresh in its own right.
For Heston, the role was a deliberate change of pace. In the same year he was also headlining Soylent Green, playing a rough detective in a dystopian future. To go from that to a cardinal in a period swashbuckler, within months, showed a versatility that his epic image sometimes obscured. He was not merely a heroic leading man; he was a character actor with a leading man’s presence, capable of dominating a scene from the edge of the frame. Critics at the time noted that his Richelieu stole every scene he was in, not by overpowering the other actors but by underplaying them — a lesson in screen acting that younger performers in the cast could hardly have missed.
The film’s legacy has only grown. Lester’s two Musketeers films are now widely regarded as among the finest adaptations of Dumas ever made, praised for their humour, their fidelity to the novel’s spirit, and their refusal to sand down its moral complexity. Heston returned as Richelieu for the sequel, and the two performances together form a complete portrait: a man who is both villain and statesman, both enemy and, in a strange way, the only adult in a court full of children playing at politics. It is a reminder that the best villains, like the best heroes, believe they are right.
For Past Tunes readers, The Three Musketeers is also a delightful entry point into Heston’s 1970s work beyond science fiction and disaster films. It shows him having fun, in a superb ensemble, in a film that trusts its audience to enjoy history, literature, and swordplay all at once. If his dystopian films asked what happens when civilisation collapses, this film asks a different question: what happens when civilisation is still standing, but its rulers are playing games with other people’s lives? Heston’s answer, delivered with a quiet smile, is that someone will always be watching — and plotting — from the shadows.