Father-and-son producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind planned for the Musketeers’ saga to comprise one epic film. Realizing they had three-and-a-half hours’ worth of material, they opted to split it in two, to the ire of the cast and crew. (Today all SAG actors have a “Salkind clause” in their contracts, requiring that they know how many films are being made.) The Four Musketeers traces the second half of Alexandre Dumas’s novel, slightly lessening the slapstick and—as the title implies—accenting the villainy of the scheming Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway). Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Oliver Reed, and Frank Finlay remain unsurpassed as Dumas’s chivalrous swordsmen—roles at one time earmarked for The Beatles!