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correspondingly less enthusiastic. It was certainly a darker film than the M3, largely because I had stuck to Dumas in Milady’s murder of D’Artagnan’s mistress, and the subsequent execution of Milady at the hands of the Musketeers. The sight of Faye Dunaway in a nun’s habit strangling Raquel Welch with a rosary was strong stuff after the knockabout cheerfulness of thefirst film; so was her beheading, and whereas in the M3 the fights had been mostly light-hearted affairs, the final duel of the M4, fought in a church, and ending with Michael York transfixing Christopher Lee against a Bible open on a lectern, was stark and grim beyond the norm for a swashbuckler.
    For what it’s worth, I still like it better than the M3, because I do love to jolt an audience, or a reader, and the direction was Dick at his inspired best—I did not take seriously his remark after we’d watched the rough-cut on the little Moviola machine at Twickenham: “One of these days you’re going to have to tell me what this film is about.” He knew, all right, but it wasn’t a conventional costume melodrama by any means. I value it for Oliver Reed’s superb Athos, and the splendid playing of Faye Dunaway against him and Heston and Michael Gothard—the sequence in which Michael is turned from Milady’s Puritan jailer into her lover is one of the best in the two pictures; it did in a few minutes what took Dumas a few chapters, thanks to the expertise of Faye and Michael and Dick. But they were all terrific, and as I once wrote in another book, no screenwriter was ever so fortunate, or more grateful.
    One interesting exercise arose from the splitting of the production into two films: I had to write a prologue to the M4, for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t seen the M3. This was done by having a Musketeer voice the prologue over clips from the end of the first film, and worked very well. What intrigued me was that I had to do two prologues, worded slightly differently, one spoken by Porthos (Frank Finlay) for British audiences, the other by Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) for the American market. Don’t ask me why this was necessary, or why it was thought advisable to have Jean-Pierre Cassel’s excellent King Louis dubbed by another actor. There is much about the movie business that I still don’t understand—and that includes such controversial things as percentages which you think are going to accrue, but don’t. I’m not complaining; Iwas incredibly lucky to be asked to write the M3 and the M4, and I’d have done them for nothing. Well, almost nothing.
    Time magazine, like the other journals, was less rhapsodic about the M4, but still complimentary, reflecting that it would be nice to see D’Artagnan and Co. “just one more time.” I thought privately that two Musketeer movies were about as much as the market would bear at the moment, but that it would be fun to do Twenty Years After , Dumas’s sequel to the first book, one of these days—perhaps twenty years after. In fact, it was only fifteen years later that Pierre Spengler, who had been executive in charge of production on the first two films, suggested that we get together again and continue the saga with the Musketeers coming out of retirement to rescue King Charles I from Cromwell’s executioners and face the wrath of Milady’s vengeful offspring.
    In the intervening years I had worked with Dick on Royal Flash , with Pierre on Superman , and with both on various other projects which (like so many productions) hadn’t got the length of photography. I was elated at the thought of reprising all the fun of the first movies, and the three of us had the kind of good script meetings that you get only with old friends.
    There were two hurdles to get over at the start, the first being that this was Pierre’s production, the Salkinds weren’t involved, and we weren’t going to be able to use any footage from the M3 and M4, which would have been useful for scene-setting, though