The modern corporate university » « The Three (or maybe Four) Musketeers and their puzzling lack of muskets

The Beatles as The Four Musketeers?

In yesterday’s post about the 1973 film The Three Musketeers, I mentioned that the director Richard Lester had once had the idea of casting the Beatles in the role of the four Musketeers.

Ever since then, I have been idly thinking about which Beatle would be best to play each role and this is what I ended up with:

Paul – D’Artagnan
John – Athos
Ringo – Porthos
George – Aramis

One can extend this silly speculation even further and ask about casting the Marx brothers in the four roles. One would have to add one of the lesser known brothers such as Zeppo or another serious actor to serve as the foil for the antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in order to make up the quartet.

My choice would be for the serious brother to play D’Artagnan, with Groucho playing the cynical Athos, Harpo playing the somewhat spiritual Porthos, and Chico playing the Lothario Aramis. And of course the long-suffering Margaret Dumont would play Milady.

I actually think that this idea might have worked for the Marx brothers back in the day.

The modern corporate university » « The Three (or maybe Four) Musketeers and their puzzling lack of muskets

Comments

  1. SchreiberBike says

    These are the kind of things I like to think about as my country falls apart. I tend toward editing Wikipedia, deep cleaning my home and commenting on blogs, but alternative movie casts is good too. My best to you and our country.

  2. moarscienceplz says

    My understanding is that John was the prickly one constantly taking offense at the innocuous comments of others, so he seems better cast as d’Artagnan. Then again, much of this info is coming from Paul, so take it with a large grain of salt.

  3. says

    So which of the Beatles’ managers would play the Musketeers’ CO as he tried to explain and excuse the boys’ misconduct to their king?

    Also, I suspect having the Beatles fighting and killing people with swords would be too silly even for the Beatles. Or the Marx Bros.

  5. Alan G. Humphrey says

    Once I started to think about various groups of people to play the various roles in The Three Musketeers these came to mind. The rat pack, the brat pack, the stable of actors from the Coen brother’s movies, the cast from Princess Bride, and even female musketeers of Madonna, Shakira, and JLo with Taylor Swift as D’Artagnan while Eminem plays M’Laddie. A wide gamut from serious to musical to farce.

  6. John Morales says

    In actual history, Ringo joined the existing band featuring the three Beatles.

    (Turns out Pete Best was not the best)

  7. Mano Singham says

    Raging Bee @#3,

    In swordplay duels, the goal was to satisfy one’s honor and that did not necessarily require one to to kill the opponent. As this article says,:

    Many sword duels were fought only until the slightest blood was shed and the aggrieved party satisfied –a result easily achievable by swords in particular. But many more were expressively fought to the death

    Curiously, as Warfare in the West became more industrial, more mechanized, and more lethal during the mid-to-late 19th century, Western fencing became sportified. It transitioned into a safe athletic pastime and recreational game at the same time the gun-culture entirely took hold. But the sword duel for matters of personal honor persisted. A longer and lighter dueling version of the épée’ emerged strictly for conducting such affairs as did a thinner and lighter “civilianized” sabre. When clerks, lawyers, and journalists could find excuse over any trivial minutia to “duel” in the park using featherweight weapons employed in a manner to produce mere pinking wounds, things were reduced to near farce. As the 20th century approached, sword duels had been reduced to a highly regulated activity seldom offering any serious danger to its participants and deaths by sword wound were a rarity.

    Even in the 1973 film, people bled but it was not clear if anyone actually died. So it would be easy to make a comedy in which no one actually died.

  8. says

    Actually, I’m pretty sure people did die in swordfights in the movie, at least when Musketeers were fighting the Cardinal’s men. The lethal violence wasn’t really explicit, since the movie had to stay in GP-rating territory; but most of the fights were to the death. They certainly were in the book.

  9. John Morales says

    Duelling in general, RB.

    Though it should be noted that custom varied extensively over history and over cultures.

    The particular version at hand would be that of the milieu in which the canonical work is set.

  10. John Morales says

    One could consider the most recent USA Prezzy debate a sort of symbolic duel between two elderly men.

  11. mikeym says

    “In swordplay duels, the goal was to satisfy one’s honor and that did not necessarily require one to to kill the opponent.”

    One of my favorite scenes has Aramis threatening his opponent, “You’ll pay for this!” He then takes his purse, and withdraws the price of his damaged hat, and returns the purse.

  12. says

    John: I don’t remember most of the swordfighting in the movie as dueling; it was more like brawling or gang-fighting. Highly romanticized brawling to be sure, but still brawling. Although the Musketeers did seem to have one rule, which was that each of them fought his opponent one-on-one, without assisting each other except when one of them found himself facing more than one opponent at a time.

  13. Mano Singham says

    Raging Bee,

    There is a scene in the Marx brothers film A Night in Casablanca that shows how duels could be played as comedy without killing. In one scene Harpo has to fight a sword duel with a villain and Harpo simply wears his opponent down by parrying his thrusts until he collapses from exhaustion. Silly, not doubt, but an example of what might be done as a comedy.

  14. John Morales says

    Raging Bee, Mano @7 was referring to duelling in general, not to the movie, as his citation makes clear.

    —

    In one scene Harpo has to fight a sword duel with a villain and Harpo simply wears his opponent down by parrying his thrusts until he collapses from exhaustion.

    Works for gladiatorial combat, too.

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