The Princess Bride (1987) The Princess Bride (1987)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (The Princess Bride) | Backbeats (The Princess Bride)

Quick Facts

• Director: Rob Reiner
• Screenplay: William Goldman (adapted from his 1973 novel The Princess Bride)
• Starring: Cary Elwes (Westley), Robin Wright (Buttercup), Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya), Wallace Shawn (Vizzini), André the Giant (Fezzik), Chris Sarandon (Prince Humperdinck), Christopher Guest (Count Rugen, the six-fingered man), Billy Crystal (Miracle Max), Carol Kane (Valerie), Peter Falk (the grandfather), Fred Savage (the grandson)
• Cinematography: Adrian Biddle
• Editor: Robert Leighton
• Music: Mark Knopfler
• Runtime: 98 minutes
• Budget: approximately $16 million
• US Box Office: approximately $30.9 million
• Release Date: September 25, 1987 (US)
• MPAA Rating: PG
• Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Overview

A grandfather reads his sick grandson a storybook adventure that turns out to be a fairy-tale romance, swordfight comedy, kidnap caper, revenge quest, fake-corpse rescue, and palace-storming wedding-crash all at once. Cary Elwes plays Westley, the farm boy who returns from apparent death to reclaim Buttercup (Robin Wright) from the engineered marriage Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) has arranged as the casus belli for a war with Guilder. Mandy Patinkin's Inigo Montoya, twenty years into hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father, stitches the rescue plot to the revenge plot when the two collide at the castle gate. The frame device — Peter Falk reading to a skeptical Fred Savage — turns the film's earnestness about true love and honor into something the audience is allowed to believe alongside a kid being talked out of his cynicism in real time, which is the structural argument the film actually wants to make.