The Princess Bride (film): Difference between revisions

In a plot against the throne, Buttercup is kidnapped by the criminal trio of Vizzini (the mastermind), Fezzik (the dumb muscle) and Inigo Montoya (the world’s greatest fencer, traveling to avenge his father) - but their steps are hampered by a mysterious man in black who seems determined to stop them at all costs. The subsequent adventures are madcap, iconic and brilliant.

 

 

{{tropenamer|page=The Princess Bride}}

* [[I Am Not Left-Handed]]

* [[My Name Is Inigo Montoya]]

* [[Only Mostly Dead]]

* [[Rodents of Unusual Size]]

 

{{tropelist|page=The Princess Bride}}

* [[Buy Them Off]]

* [[Catapult Nightmare]]: Buttercup.

* [[Choke Holds]]: The Man in Black knocks out Fezzik with a blood choke. It takes several minutes and they have a rather cordial conversation all the while.

* [[Clark Kenting]]: The Dread Pirate Roberts and {{spoiler|Westley}}. It’s amazing {{spoiler|Buttercup}} takes so long to realize it.

* [[Cuffs Off, Rub Wrists]]: Buttercup after being untied.

* [[Curb Stomp Battle]]: During the [[Storming the Castle]] sequence, four palace guards charge our heroes. [[Badass Spaniard|Inigo]] kills them in five. seconds. flat. Without ever taking his eyes off [[The Dragon|Count Rugen]].

* [[Derailed for Details]]: The kid in the [[Framing Device]], occasionally. Sometimes asking to skip romance scenes or [[Get On With It Already]].

* [[Determinator]]: Inigo in his fight with Count Rugen. Stabbed repeatedly and still keeps coming. He '''will''' avenge his father’s death.

* [[Double Take]]

* [[The Dreaded]]: The Dread Pirate Roberts.

** The [[Evil Genius]]: Vizzini

** [[The Dark Chick]]: Inigo Montoya

* [[Flynning]]: The duel on the Cliffs of Insanity in the film is basically an homage. The screenplay explicitly says they’re Flynning as they have nothing personal driving their duel and are trying to have fun with someone who can fight as well as they can.

* [[Fractured Fairy Tale]]: Interruptions in between and the occasional [[Rodents of Unusual Size]].

* [[Framing Device]] / [[Separate Scene Storytelling]]: The kid and the grandpa, and the main scenes of the movie.

* [[Genre Savvy]]: The entire story.

** A particularly good example from the film:

** Inigo has Good Scars.

** And Count Rugen gets Evil Scars! For bonus points they’re exactly the same wounds he’s inflicted on Inigo, from cheeks to gut. {{spoiler|(And then he dies ten seconds later)}}.

* [[Hair of Gold]]: Both Buttercup and Westley.

* [[Happily Ever After]]

* [[He Will Come for Me]]: No less than three Will Come For Me moments.

** A variation while Buttercup is held prisoner by the Man in Black.

{{quote|'''Valerie''': Liar! Liar! LIIIAAAAAR!}}

* [[Heroic Second Wind]]: Inigo isn’t going down that easily.

* [[Home, Sweet Home]]: Westley wants to settle down with Buttercup.

* [[I Am Not Left-Handed]]: The Chatty Duel is the [[Trope Namer]].

* [[I Don't Pay You to Think]]: Vizzini tells Fezzik “You were not hired for your brains!”

* [[Ignoring by Singing]]: Miracle Max’s response when his wife provokes him by reminding him of his treatment by Prince Humperdinck.

* [[The Igor]]: The Albino.

** Subverted: He starts speaking in a typical “Igor voice,” then coughs and continues speaking in a perfectly normal voice.

* [[Incendiary Exponent]]: Fezzik during the storming of the castle.

* [[Indecisive Medium]]: The film is about reading a book.

'''Man in Black:''' Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.}}

* [[Instant Plunder, Just Add Pirates]]: The Dread Pirate Roberts, to be precise.

* [[Ironic Echo]]: “I swear it will be done.” (Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen)

* [[Karma Houdini]]: {{spoiler|Prince Humperdinck}}.

* [[Legacy Character]]: The Dread Pirate Roberts. Westley reveals that he is at least the third person to use the mantle in order to uphold the legend. Fezzik even briefly takes up the identity to scare a few guards in one scene. {{spoiler|At the end of the movie, Inigo wonders what to do now that he got his revenge, and Westley passes the name to him.}}

* [[Leitmotif]]: Skillfully done with Fezzik’s plodding slide trombone theme. You can’t help but smile when you hear it, especially in this scene:

''Cue leitmotif as huge hands pick Inigo up''

'''Fezzik:''' [[Rhymes on a Dime|You surely are a meanie.]] }}

** Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck!

** Also, Count Rugen: “Stop ''saying'' that!”

* [[No Time to Explain]]: “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

* [[Only a Flesh Wound]]: In his final battle with Count Rugen, Inigo twice deflects sword thrusts into his shoulder and yet seems to show no visible effect from it.

* [[Only Mostly Dead]]: [[Trope Namer]]. After Humperdinck kills Westley, his friends take him to Miracle Max, who diagnoses him as “only mostly dead” and thus a candidate for revival.

* [[Our Hero Is Dead]]: {{spoiler|Well, it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.}}

* [[Out-Gambitted]]: Go ahead and go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line {{spoiler|if you are immune to a poison you are using}}.

* [[Paper-Thin Disguise]]: It took {{spoiler|“[[As You Wish]]”}} to realize it?!

* [[Passing the Torch]]: Suggested in the film that Inigo will take Westley’s place {{spoiler|as the Dread Pirate Roberts.}}

* [[Person with the Clothing]]: The Man in Black.

* [[Pet Rat]]: The goons hired by Prince Humperdinck whose job is to clear out the Thieves Quarter. Not to mention Vizzini and his crew.

* [[Pistol-Whipping]]: Sword whipping, actually.

* [[Plot-Powered Stamina]]: Fezzik’s arms never get tired.

* [[Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo]]: Part of Vizzini’s [[Batman Gambit]] that revolves around the aforementioned [[I Know You Know I Know]].

* [[Pragmatic Adaptation]]: Interesting case since the author himself adapted it to a screenplay. The book had far more characters (who were usually only important to one other character) who had great lines transplanted on to movie characters. (“Life hurts. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.” was said by Fezzik’s mother to her son in the book, not Westley to Buttercup.) However, William Goldman has a long and storied career as a Hollywood screenwriter, so he is better suited than most writers to adapt his work. In particular, it seems like he had a [[Fridge Logic]] moment near the end that he added into the screenplay — presumably Buttercup didn’t say “I do” in the book either, but Westley doesn’t think of that, instead just saying basically “Well, that’s okay, you won’t be married to him [[Murder the Hypotenuse|very long]].”

** The extraordinarily complicated stack of frame stories and unreliable narrations in the book, all focused on the reader-writer relationship (S. Morgenstern’s novel — in Florinese and in translation; the version Goldman remembers his grandfather telling him; Goldman’s opinionated summaries of sections he’s “cut”; the unflattering fictional “Goldman” narrating the outer layer, complete with unflattering family life; commentary by his copy-editor and an eminent Morgenstern scholar; the supposed ‘real’ history of Florin and Guilder, and of course the actual book) is slimmed down to one simple frame story, removing practically all the postmodernism and satire, for the movie. Hilariously, the fictionalized Goldman discusses and complains, in the book’s introduction, about the restrictions imposed by executives when adapting books for Hollywood; the real Goldman clearly knew exactly what he was going to have to do for the movie adaptation ''when he wrote the book''.

* [[Prince Charmless]]: And {{spoiler|Murderous!}}

* [[Psycho for Hire]]: Count Rugen

* [[Punch Clock Villain]]: Inigo and Fezzik.

{{quote|'''Inigo:''' I work for Vizzini to pay the bills. There’s not a lot of money in revenge.}}

* [[Punch-Punch-Punch Uh-Oh]]

* [[Quicksand Sucks]]: In the cave with the ROUS.

* [[Rated "M" for Manly]]

* [["Reading Is Cool" Aesop]]

* [[Red Right Hand]]: It has six fingers.

* [[Screw the Money, I Have Rules]]: [[Precision F-Strike|“I want my father back, you son of a bitch!”]]

* [[Secret Test]]: {{spoiler|When Westley rescues Buttercup, his True Love, from her kidnappers, he doesn’t reveal his true identity, in the hope of finding out whether she still loves him or not.}}

* [[Shown Their Work]]: In the duel between Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya. Bonetti's Defense was once famous among English swordmasters, though mostly as a target of criticism. Capo Ferro, Thibault, and Agrippa are well known sword masters. Ridolfo Capo Ferro and Camillo Agrippa wrote books available at amazon.

* [[The Slow Walk]]: Inigo during his final duel with Count Rugen. Justified because he was seriously injured at the time.

* [[So Beautiful It's a Curse]]: Buttercup. Her beauty is enough to get her promoted to future queen, except the Prince threatens to kill her if she refuses. And {{spoiler|he’s planning to kill her anyway}}. In fact, if she were slightly less beautiful, the whole conflict wouldn’t have happened.

* [[So What Do We Do Now?]]: {{spoiler|Inigo gets his revenge, but he spent all his adult life in pursuit of it. What should he do? Fortunately Westley passes on the mantle of The Dread Pirate Roberts to him.}}

* [[Sparing the Aces]]: The Man in Black would no sooner kill a genius than shatter a stained glass window.

* [[Stealth Pun]]: At the end of the movie, when Inigo wonders what to do with his life:

* [[Theme Naming]]: Florin and Guilder are different names for the same medieval European coin. Currency with those names is still in use today.

* [[Thicker Than Water]]

* [[Try and Follow]]: The Fire Swamp ''and'' the Cliffs of Insanity.

* [[Two-Faced Aside]]: When Buttercup asks Humperdinck to promise he’ll return Westley to his ship:

* [[Unreliable Voiceover]]: “Fezzik took great care in reviving Inigo.” This is said as Fezzik shoves Inigo’s head into alternating basins of hot and cold water. Repeatedly.

* [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight|Unusually Uninteresting Sound]]: All of one person other than the main characters seems to notice the eerie, overlapping scream that’s loud enough to be heard all over Florin. And he just turns his head slightly before walking on, all of the other peasants blithely ignoring it. Of course, Inigo has to tell Fezzik to stop and listen before the giant acknowledges it, so it might simply not be as loud to the characters as it is to [[Rule of Perception|the viewers]].

* [[Video Credits]]

* [[Villainous Breakdown]]: As Inigo refuses to die, and slowly gains the upper hand on Rugen in their duel, Rugen first becomes shaken, then demands that Inigo “Stop saying that!”

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Notable Quotables]]

[[Category:Fantasy Films]]

[[Category:Film]]

[[Category:The Criterion Collection (LaserDisc)]]