The Fifth Musketeer. the 1979 romp based on the works of Alexandre Dumas, and showcasing the classic characters of d’Artagnan and his three musketeer friends, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, airs late tonight on TCM. The film is, obviously, a period piece. It stars an international cast and yet French accents are almost entirely non-existent throughout. This does not, nay, cannot, bother me in the slightest because I grew up loving old Hollywood movies and if there’s one thing that holds true about studio-era Hollywood and accents, it’s that no one but no one cared. Ray Milland as a New York writer, with a brother played by American actor Phillip Terry, with the two of them sounding as if they were raised on separate continents, in The Lost Weekend? Sure, why not? Hollywood did that kind of thing all the time and didn’t care if the actor sounded even remotely like they were from the location in question. Since I grew up with that kind of thing, it doesn’t bother me at all. But when an actor is in the wrong period for his type, well then, I’ve got a bone to pick.
Back to The Fifth Musketeer. Among the cast of actors not attempting in any way to sound French are Rex Harrison, Cornel Wilde, José Ferrer, Alan Hale, Jr, Olivia de Havilland (her last screen role), Lloyd Bridges, and his son, Beau Bridges. It’s those last two that got me. They’re not 17th century period actors, they’re 19th century period actors! Doesn’t everyone know that Lloyd and Beau, if and when they do period pieces, are supposed to be on horses in the old west with six-shooters at their sides, not prancing around in the age of Louis XIV with foils at their sides. Certain actors just look and sound right for certain periods, some don’t. Lloyd and Beau just don’t feel at all 16th century to me. I enjoyed the movie (mildly, it’s honestly not very good) but in spite of them, not because of them. Had they been in a saloon ordering whiskey, it would’ve been a different story.
Speaking of which, the sight of Errol Flynn in anything resembling the dusty west always makes me wince. And they did it more than once! Heck, he played Jeb Stuart and George Custer. Errol Flynn! Now there’s an actor who could play a French musketeer with ease. Show him prancing around with a foil and the whole world makes sense. Robin Hood and Captain Blood feel completely right for this man. George Armstrong Custer feels like a mistake. And here’s the other thing with Errol Flynn: I can accept him in contemporary stories as well but, honestly, he’s one actor that I think should almost always have been cast in period pieces. His chemical makeup was period, for whatever reason. I’ve got no actual objective way to measure that, of course, but he always seemed a little out of place whenever he was in anything that was modern.
Conversely, Marlon Brando has always seemed out of place to me in anything other than contemporary roles and I say this knowing full well he played in more than a few period pieces and did several to great success. But seriously, as weird and fascinating as his oddball performance as Fletcher Christian is in the 1962 update of Mutiny on the Bounty, I can never look at him in that and think anything other than that’s a 20th century man on an 18th century ship. I like him better in Burn! from 1969. And while he works well in western period pieces, like The Missouri Breaks, I prefer my Brando firmly planted in the mid to late 20th century, working on the docks, riding motorcycles and making people offers they can’t refuse.
Of course, for every actor that got miscast in a period or place, there were plenty where Hollywood knew exactly what it was doing. No one ever tried to put Thelma Ritter in a hoop skirt and white powdered wig and parade her around Versailles. Perhaps the wonderful Ritter was so completely modern, urban, and cynical, that it was simply an unwritten rule, “Never Cast Thelma in Anything Non-Contemporary.”
But I’m not writing this piece just to confirm what we all already know. I’m also here to confess a couple of things, too. And I confess that despite her having been in some period pieces, and even winning an Oscar for one of them, I never much liked Katharine Hepburn in period pieces. Yes, that includes The Lion in Winter for which she won her third Best Actress (of an eventual four). I love Peter O’Toole in it (and think he should have won!) and all the young actors are great (Anthony Hopkins, Nigel Terry, Timothy Dalton) but Kate seems… well. Okay, how do I explain this? Katherine Hepburn, an actress I have always liked, had that voice, that accent, that way of talking that, for me at least, made her an educated, New Englandy, modern woman. Since that voice, that way of talking, never went away for even a single performance, I never quite lose myself in her period performances.
A part of the Hepburn problem (let’s just call it that for shorthand) is the level of urbane sophistication of the actor. Take the two cases of Errol Flynn and Cary Grant. In real life, both had the same sophisticated, cosmopolitan air but Flynn seemed like a rake and Grant seemed like a gentleman. Flynn had the jauntiness to play a Robin Hood type while Grant had the self-effacement to play the flustered urban male (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Bringing Up Baby). Oh sure, Gunga Din is a period piece, but Grant plays the modern Cary trading witty retorts with his contemporary chums, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and Victor McLaglen. In another period piece, The Howards of Virginia, he’s not so lucky. No, Cary and Katherine were simply too sophisticated to really convince me they were anything but 20th century jet-setters.
In the end, I’ll watch any great actor in anything (including Cary Grant in The Howards of Virginia) but I prefer they stick to the periods that fit their personalities best. And the place. John Wayne could play different periods, from the old west straight through to the present day, but his voice and swagger plant him squarely in America, not Mongolia (ahem, The Conqueror). Other times, it doesn’t much matter. Clark Gable is no more British than Brando but his Fletcher Christian seems absolutely natural to me, even while seeming typically American. I guess the fundamental lesson is, cast your characters with your stars in mind. If they don’t fit the character, don’t try to make the character fit them. Otherwise, you end up with Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker and I have to tell you, I’m still trying to figure that one out.