Gosh darn it--I watched them in the wrong order!!!

I'm a big fan of the silent movie swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. So when The Iron Mask (1929), came up as a suggested movie for me on Netflix, it was with some embarrassment that I realized I had never seen either it or Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers (1921).

So I popped The Iron Mask to the top of my Netflix list and watched it a few days later when the disc arrived. It proved to be an energetic and interesting adaptation of Dumas' classic novel. Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers, like most movie versions, used just the first half of the novel as its story, so this sequel was able to incorporate events from the second half of that novel with elements from The Man in the Iron Mask. It also came out right at the beginning of the sound era--so, though it is still a silent film, D'Artagnan is given a couple of short speeches: a prologue and another speech later on to help bridge a twenty year jump in time.


The next movie I got from Netflix was indeed Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers.  Loved that one, too. Especially the fight between the Musketeers and Cardinal's Guards, with D'Artagnan at one point doing a really cool somersault over a Guard to take him down and save Aramis' life.

But, gosh darn it, I therefore watched them in the wrong order!! I hate it when that happens. Oh, well, I'll watch 'em again one day and make sure I get them in the right order.And, of course, it really doesn't matter at all. It's not as if I'm not already intimately familiar with both stories. But that's the way my mind works--I gotta watch stuff in order. I just gotta.