Film & History News

One wishes that Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Campbell or Vine Deloria, Jr., had written The Only Good Indian. The list oftitles, there printing of a few excellent old reviews, and the many photos are all that redeem the book. Reviewed by Robert H. Keller who teaches Indian History ofFairhaven College, WWSC, Bellingham, Washington. FILM & HISTORY NEWS (1 963) is a searching re-examination ofthe World War Il resistance period in Czechoslovakia and is rarely seen in the United States. Czech director Jiri Weiss and Czech scholar Eugen Loebl, Professor of Economics at Vassar, led a discussion after the film. FILM REVIEWS THE THREE MUSKETEERS (Twentieth Century Fox, 1974) 107 minutes. By Carl Diehl Athos! Porthos! Aramis! "One for All and All for One!" Was this not the Wheaties ofhistorical imagination for generations of European and American adolescents? Through the ironically frenzied, half-absurd, Romantic-Realist prose of a nineteenth-century semi-potboiler we learned the ethos of adventure, the romance of ambition requited in robust and roistering combat. D'Artagnan was indeed the full-blooded "Don Quixote of eighteen" to juvenile minds too impatient for the quibbling literary ironies ofthe real master of Dulcinea. And for those too impatient with the only partly quibbling literary ironies of Pere Dumas prose, the twentieth century writ the four adventurers large in celluloid. In the heroic lunges, thrusts and parries ofDouglas Fairbanks and his legions oflarge-screen cohorts, absurdities were drowned in action, ironies flattened like Kansas jackrabbits on the east-west Interstate. Now, armed with the tactile color textures of Richardson and the wide-angled sentimentality ofLean, Richard Lester fits his camera with a new lens ofabsurdity and draws a bead on the heroic animi of our adolescences, the chimera of our historical fancies, The Three Musketeers. Ifironies and absurdities are preserved, they are also exaggerated—to the point ofburlesque. Like the absurd, bathetic duelling schlmiels he creates, Lester misses as often as he hits. Yet his are not merely the Three Stooges ofthe Frondes. Under his battering burlesque—the demolition ofdignity, heroism, and nineteenth-century sentimental romance—lurks not only an existentially demythologized vision ofthe past, but the last pathetic twentieth-century dregs ofa Romantic dream of innocence, a dream that will not prick itselfawake for the merely vicious realities oflife—in the seventeenth or the twentieth centuries. Richard Lester demythologizes with the zealousness of a Puritan beadle. Louis XIII is nothing more than a petulant buffoon; Anne of Austria a simpering ninny, and 32 ...