March 26 movie: The Three Musketeers. The Gene Kelly version from 1948. What a fun movie! This has been done as a movie several times, and I'm most familiar with the Michael York version from the 70s. It's interesting to compare the two. One unsurprising difference is that the Gene Kelly version way downplays the adultery, which I recall being largely the point of the Michael York version. The casting is interesting also. Vincent Price is perfect for Richelieu, and Lana Turner equally ideal for Lady de Winter. June Allyson as Constance, though, that gave me mental whiplash. How can the same character be played by June Allyson (who specialized in sexless girls) and Raquel Welch (who specialized in, well, sex). It boggles the mind. Also we noticed that the ending of the Gene Kelly version is fairly true to the end of the book -- Constance and Lady de Winter are both dead, the Musketeers are disbanded, and D'Artagnan is working for Richelieu -- but they somehow make it seem like a happy ending. How they manage that, I do not know.
On the concert album Live at the Cocoanut Grove, Sammy Davis Jr. does a hilarious riff on this movie. I read in Sammy's biography Black and White that he loved watching old movies, he really absorbed them. You can totally tell from the routine that he's seen this movie a million times. He describes it accurately, in great detail. The funny thing is that the routine is funny even if you've never seen the movie. Then when you finally do see the movie, that makes the routine even funnier.
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i take me leave, my liege