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not vital. I fell back on the old stand-by beloved by scriptwriters and directors in pre-war days: an extended caption on the screen giving the historical background, which is never a happy device, plus a voice-over commentary from Michael York, which helped considerably.
    The other problem was a blessing in disguise. Dumas having inconsiderately disposed of heroine and villainess in the first book, there is a decided shortage of interesting femininity in Twenty Years After . I solved this by turning Milady’s avenging son into a daughter,a blonde and beautiful seductress who would also be a dab hand with rapiers, explosives, and miniature crossbows. That done, Dumas’s main plot was straightforward, and needed only the usual cutting and embroidery.
    It was fascinating to see the original cast in musketeer uniform again. Oliver Reed and Frank Finlay were showing grey, but Chamberlain was Chamberlain still, and Michael York looked so ridiculously young that a rumour arose suggesting that somewhere in an attic there was a Dorian Grey portrait of him showing the ageing process. Roy Kinnear was as portly a Planchet as ever, Christopher Lee stalked the screen as a formidable Rochefort, and Jean-Pierre Cassel ranted splendidly as Cyrano de Bergerac (with his own voice this time).
    In addition to the old hands, Pierre had assembled a first-rate cast of newcomers to the musketeer canon: Bill Paterson was a fine lookalike King Charles and Alan Howard an imposing Cromwell, Kim Cattrall sneered and swaggered it up a storm as the lovely villainess, Philippe Noiret was an urbane, devious Cardinal Mazarin, and C. Thomas Howell a properly stiff-necked and explosive son of Athos. Bill Hobbs was again the fight arranger, and the production wouldn’t have been complete without Eddie Fowlie in charge of props. This was the team that set off for Spain with such high hopes.
    It is an excellent rule, and one which I’ve tried to follow with only moderate success, that the farther a scriptwriter can stay away from the actual shooting, the better. For one thing, they’ll just make you work; for another, you have to restrain a mad impulse to get into the act and show them how it should be done. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to master it, and watch the proceedings deadpan—so much so that Lester was once heard to exclaim: “Look at him, standing there in his steel-rimmed spectacles—he’s hating it!” In fact, I wasn’t; it’s just my normal expression.
    However, I broke my rule this time. I wanted to watch the oldgang at work again, and also to see one particular scene being shot. King Charles I, like most of the Stuarts, was a golfer, and I’d decided it would be nice to see him slashing away in the rough, and wrote a scene to that effect. Dick had the inspired idea of getting Billy Connolly to play the caddy, and the result was quite my favourite sequence in the movie—so, naturally, most of it ended up on the cutting-room floor; there’s a malign destiny that causes that sort of thing to happen. But at least I saw it, and have the whole thing on tape.
    I flew home again full of optimism. It was a happy shoot, they were plainly enjoying it, and everything was looking good.
    Then the blow fell. Pierre phoned me at home one night, and I remember exactly what he said: “Our old friend Roy Kinnear passed away today.” I couldn’t believe it; when I’d last seen Roy he’d been in splendid form, lying contentedly under a Spanish oak making remarks as Oliver Reed and Bill Paterson rehearsed a scene; now suddenly that jolly, witty, lively man whom everyone had loved, was dead, literally in the prime of life.
    It had been a ghastly accident, a fall from a horse in which he suffered internal injuries which proved fatal. It put the production into shock from which it never recovered.
    My first reaction was the human one: shocked misery. My second was the professional: what happens to the picture? How much of Roy’s part is in the