The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922)
Directed by Max Linder

Film Review

Max Linder gets his swash well and truly buckled in this outlandish parody of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers.  Actually, it's probably more accurate to describe it as a spoof of Fred Niblo's 1921 adaptation of the novel, with Linder getting away with the most merciless (and hilarious) send up of Douglas Fairbanks you can imagine.  (Fairbanks apparently loved the film.)  The plot goes somewhat A.W.O.L. around the mid-point and the film ends up as a rapid succession of marvellously executed comedy set-pieces, which actually get funnier on repeated viewings.  No anachronism is left unturned as Linder's manic humour goes into overdrive, with typewriters, telephones and the odd motor-vehicle 'accidentally' slipping into the frame.

We may quibble about the title The Three Must-Get-Theres - surely it should have been The Three Must-Get-Theirs? - but everything else about the film is perfect, including Linder's surprisingly accomplished swordsmanship.  The fight scenes are not only funny they are exceptionally well choreographed (Max never did anything by halves), and arguably better than those in Niblo's film.  Linder's desperate attempts to get his stubborn, cow-fancying horse to Paris take up most of the first reel, but once we are in Paris things take off with a vengeance and the gags come so fast you can hardly keep up.  Cardinal Richelieu is recast as a Blofeld-like baddie, but instead of a cat he gets to stroke the balding head of a dutiful monk, in a way that is indefinably creepy. When our hero faces certain doom, surrounded by about a dozen of his enemies, he casually ducks and naturally they end up stabbing each other - the gag could only have worked with a Busby Berkeley-like ceiling shot (could Berkeley have been inspired by this film?)

A riotous comedy masterpiece, The Three Must-Get-Theres should have been the film that made Linder a massive Hollywood star, but like his two previous American features, Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) and Be My Wife (1921), it was ill-received and failed to make a decent return at the box office.  Disheartened by yet another failure, and convinced that he had lost the art of being funny, Linder returned to France, where he was persuaded to appear in the short film Au secours! (1924) before heading off to Vienna to make his final film, The King of the Circus (1925).   Within a decade of his death in 1925, the comedy giant that had been cinema's first superstar and had once made the world roar with laughter would be forgotten.

Film Synopsis

France, 1625.  Dart-In-Again is a young man with high hopes of becoming a musketeer in the service of King Louis XIII, but the king already has three perfectly able musketeers - Walrus, Octopus and Porpoise - and one more might be considered de trop.  Dart-In-Again soon proves his worth, however, by foiling a scheme by the dastardly Li'l Cardinal Richie-Loo to discredit the Queen and make himself even more powerful.  Along the way, he wins the heart of the lovely Constance Bonne-aux-Fieux and learns that the sword is definitely mightier than the pen...