This movie has the advantage to start from the viewpoint of a woman, the later Mylady, comtesse de Fer (Yvette Lebon) who is imprisoned in a convent. The director Vittorio Cottafavi knows how to point the camera in her face. That face shows all the possible expressions a woman can have: fear, anger, love, despair and love? Does this woman really love somebody? I doubt it and that is the crucial theme of the story: women are dangerous. Yvette Lebon is so beautiful in this movie that everybody must fall in love with her. So she is invited by the comte de Fer (Rossano Brazzi). She has the skill to push all her lovers into marriage. The hangman (Jean-Roger Caussimon) is a special person in the movie because he only intervenes at the end of the beginning and he is the brother of her first lover. She will never go with him back to the lieutenant, who made her escape from the convent, by her free will. The story is not in a straight line and you never are sure what will happen next, what makes it better than the other musketeer-films. The historical background is correct in the details: the uniforms and even the regimental colours. Justice was hard at that time and the hangman can take the place of his brother but why is he so sure that his brother will come back? He takes a great risk by doing this. Fleeing justice must have been a hazardous operation in France of the 16th century and Lady De Winter will be confronted with her past and her future by a story-teller. One detail seems not to be so relevant as it appears: when condemned the prisoners (Mylady and the lieutenant) received the mark of the King's Justice in the form of a Lys burned into the shoulder but this is never recorded later in the movie. It is also confusing for whom lady De Winter is spying and why Louis XIII wants her to be executed at the end or why comte de Fer becomes another person in the movie (Athos). The sword-fighting is virtuose and gives a sportive flavour to the movie. The brilliant script gives this movie a more accurate idea of what happened under the government of Cardinal de Richelieu than most of the other movies of the musketeer-family. In any way when Mylady prays for forgiveness she says the truth when she claims that she is not responsible for all her sins but that destiny can be so cruel.
