The last silent by the first action hero, Douglas Fairbanks' final swashbuckling turn has an unexpectedly somber tone bellied by the film's high spirits. Directed by Allan Dwan, it zips through the Dumas plot, with Fairbanks playing the graying D'Artagnan, avenging the murder of his beloved Constance (Marguerite De La Motte) at the hands of Milady (Dorothy Revier), then revving up to foil Count de Rochefort's (Ulrich Haupt) plans to replace the young King Louis with his separated-at-birth twin. From the opening reverse tracking shot steering the mounted musketeers through the cheering crowd, its sprightly exhilaration is leveled with more than a hint of melancholy -- by 1929, with the Depression in the wings, the Dougmeister's wondrous acrobatics had already become relics of Jazz Age frivolity, just as the new arrival of sound favored the novelty of noise over the graceful visuals of a lucid artisan like Dwan. Packed with palace intrigue, nocturnal raids and Fairbanks' lovely hopping around, the film is as entertaining as their more famous Robin Hood, though laced with a touching awareness of the mortality of an epoch, visualized at the end with the hero limping out of life and into mythology. Fairbanks' demise here is, in terms of zeitgeist, as significant as John Wayne's death in The Cowboys almost forty-five years later. With Nigel de Brulier (reprising his role as Richelieu), Belle Bennett, William Bakewell, Leon Bary, Tiny Sanford, and Gino Corrado. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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