I’m not sure why I never saw The Princess Bride before. It came out in 1987, when I was a college student. I saw lots of movies back then, both on the big screen and whirring through the VCR, but not that one. And then over the years, it just slipped through the cracks.
I’d always heard good things about it. I remember once my father sitting on the couch watching it on TV with my younger sister. He raved about it and she was enraptured, but I was on my way out to carouse with friends.
Now and then people would quote lines from it; sometimes I was able to figure out the source, other times I had no idea. Slowly it seeped into the edges of my consciousness without me even realizing it.
And then the other night, my girlfriend suggested we watch it. So we did.
It is, of course, a minor masterpiece, easily living up to the hype.
Here are some random thoughts on what it is like at the age of 48 to see The Princess Bride for the first time, nearly 30 years after its theatrical release.
- Andre the Giant cannot act. Yet, casting him here was ideal. I grew up watching Andre wear a unitard and wrestle the likes of Haystacks Calhoun or six midgets at a time on local TV, Saturday nights at midnight. During his time on the pro wrestling circuit, Andre finely honed his persona as the lovable giant who didn’t really want to hurt anyone, but those evil opponents gave him no choice. All those years of flinging people around the ring seemed to lead right to this, his perfect role.
- I love Wallace Shawn and wanted his performance to be perfect. It wasn’t; there are a couple of moments when he seems to stumble through his lines. Nevertheless, he was still splendid as the self-satisfied, villainous intellectual.
- When Shawn joked that “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia,'” I laughed so hard I knocked a glass of red wine out of my girlfriend’s hand. We had to stop the movie so I could grab the seltzer and salt to clean up the couch. It worked. Anyway, historian humor.
Robin Wright, she later of the marriage to Sean Penn and more recently of House of Cards, is unrecognizable to me in the titular role. Maybe it’s because she was only 20 during filming. But even if she’s a stranger to my eye, she already has that fierceness about her.- The script is so wonderful, I can’t help but wonder about the William Goldman book it’s based on. And anyway, who the hell is William Goldman? For years I’ve been on the verge of confusing him with William Golding (Lord of the Flies), so I finally looked him up. Turns out he also wrote the novel and screenplay for Marathon Man, as well as the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Misery, and A Bridge Too Far.
- Mandy Patinkin is absolutely brilliant. I’m tempted to say he steals the show, but the show itself is so good, that’s not really possible. Either way, he is simply outstanding. Did he end up starring in some dull forensic cop drama?
- “Hello, I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die” is not an inherently great line. The greatness is really in Patinkin’s many deliveries of it.
- In some ways the movie is a flashback to the 1980s, that magical era when people thought Billy Crystal was funny. Pure schmaltz. Carol Kane opposite him nailed it though. Anyway, Eddie Murphy does “old Jewish man” way better.
- Jesus, there was a time when Rob Reiner absolutely owned Hollywood. In a span of just eight years, he directed This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men, and produced most of them as well.
- Goddamn, I miss Peter Falk.
- While leading the Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler also moonlighted writing film scores. The one he does here is nice, but I really like his score for Local Hero, which came out a few years before The Princes Bride. It too is an oddball comedy, set in Scotland and directed and written by Bill Forsythe.
- Watching a couple of guys roll around in giant rat suits is probably the only unintentionally funny moment in the movie. I wonder how that played to audiences in a pre-digital effects era, when almost no one knew the term “furries.”
