The Princess Bride opens as a bedtime story and never lets you forget it. A grandfather, played by Peter Falk, sits at the bedside of his sick grandson, played by Fred Savage, and reads him a novel. The boy does not want to hear it. The film then lives inside that book, and the joke is that the book is better than the boy expects.
Rob Reiner directed. William Goldman adapted his own novel. The film runs 99 minutes and was released on September 25, 1987.
A Farmhand Called Westley
The story begins in the kingdom of Florin. Buttercup, played by Robin Wright, is a young woman on a farm. Westley, played by Cary Elwes, is her farmhand. He answers every command with the same three words: “As you wish.” Buttercup comes to understand that the phrase means he loves her. She loves him back.
Westley leaves to find his fortune so they can marry. His ship is attacked by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who is known for leaving no survivors.
Five years pass. Buttercup, still in grief, is forced into a betrothal to Prince Humperdinck, played by Chris Sarandon. Before the wedding she is kidnapped.
Vizzini, Fezzik and Inigo Montoya
The kidnappers are a strange trio.
- Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, is a Sicilian criminal who talks too much and trusts his own mind too far.
- Fezzik, played by André Roussimoff, is a gentle Turkish giant.
- Inigo Montoya, played by Mandy Patinkin, is a Spanish swordsman hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father.
A man in black follows them across the sea, with Humperdinck and his soldiers behind him. At the Cliffs of Insanity the man in black beats Inigo in a duel and knocks him out. He chokes Fezzik into unconsciousness. He kills Vizzini by tricking him into drinking poison.
He takes Buttercup. She names him as the Dread Pirate Roberts and shoves him into a ravine. As he falls he shouts, “As you wish!” She realizes he is Westley and tumbles after him. They reunite, then flee into the Fire Swamp.
There Westley explains that the Dread Pirate Roberts is an inherited title. The Roberts before him spared Westley and recruited him. That man retired and passed the name down. Westley plans to do the same.
Goldman Wrote the Book He Adapted
The film keeps the metafictional frame of Goldman’s novel. The story on screen is a book being read aloud. That choice is the reason the film works as well as it does. It lets Reiner cut away to Falk and Savage whenever the adventure risks taking itself too seriously, and it gives the whole thing a second set of stakes: whether a bored kid will keep listening.
The casting is where the film earns its reputation. Reiner settled on Elwes for Westley after seeing him in Lady Jane. Elwes was in West Germany filming Maschenka, so Reiner flew to West Berlin to meet him. Elwes had read the book as a child and loved the character but never thought he would play him.
Wright was cast about a week before filming. Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan, Sean Young, Suzy Amis, Courteney Cox, Alexandra Paul and Whoopi Goldberg all auditioned. Casting director Jane Jenkins recalled the moment Wright met Goldman at his house: “The doorbell rang. Rob went to the door, and literally, as he opened the door, [Wright] was standing there in this little white summer dress, with her long blonde hair, and she had a halo from the sun. She was backlit by God. And Bill Goldman looked across the room at her, and he said, ‘Well, that’s what I wrote.’ It was the most perfect thing.”
Wright adopted a British accent for the part, matching the convention in medieval-set fantasy films of using British accents to suggest a historical European setting.
Shawn was picked as Vizzini for his small size, to set him against the giant Fezzik. Danny DeVito was considered for the role. Patinkin and Shawn were early choices.
The Schedule the Film Runs On
The Princess Bride moves through its set pieces in a fixed order, and the order is the argument for its pacing. Nothing overstays.
| Order | Sequence | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Frame story | A grandfather reads to his sick grandson |
| 2 | The farm | Westley answers “As you wish” |
| 3 | The kidnapping | Vizzini, Fezzik and Inigo take Buttercup |
| 4 | The Cliffs of Insanity | The man in black beats Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini |
| 5 | The ravine | Buttercup shoves Westley; he shouts “As you wish” |
| 6 | The Fire Swamp | Westley explains the Dread Pirate Roberts title |
Where the Film Stands
The Princess Bride opened to modest box office. It has since become a cult film and is now treated as one of the best films of the 1980s and one of Reiner’s best. It sits at number 50 on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies,” number 88 on the American Film Institute’s “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions,” and 46 on Channel 4’s 50 Greatest Comedy Films. It won the 1988 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the People’s Choice Award at the 12th Toronto International Film Festival.
Those honors are not noise. The Hugo is the tell. This is a fantasy film that science fiction and fantasy readers claimed as their own, and it did that without a single grim moment. Its tagline, “It’s as real as the feelings you feel,” is a joke about a storybook, but the film means it.
The weaker stretches are the ones that lean hardest on the frame. The grandson’s interruptions are funny, and Falk sells them, but they also let the film step out of its own danger whenever the danger gets real. The Fire Swamp and the Cliffs of Insanity are the parts that hold up, because there the film commits. Inigo’s hunt for the six-fingered man is the thread with the most weight, and Patinkin plays it straight while everything around him is a gag. That contrast is the film’s whole method.
What matters most is that the film never winks hard enough to break. It is a comedy that believes in its own romance. That is rare, and it is why the film outlived its opening weekend.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
