Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (7 page)

This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn’t, actually. Yes, the film is ostensibly about the great true love between Buttercup and Westley, and their most perfect kiss which leaves all the other kisses in the world behind. Both Elwes and Wright were so astonishingly beautiful when they made the film that, watching them, it’s hard to believe any love ever existed on this planet other than theirs. And they, rather pleasingly, were quite taken with one another. In his book, Elwes talks at length about how ‘smitten’ he was with Wright, and she says precisely the same about him: ‘I was absolutely smitten with Cary. So obviously that helped with our on-screen chemistry … It doesn’t matter how many years go by, I will love Cary forever.’

Disappointingly, however, Elwes insists that they remained just friends. ‘Everyone asks if there was more!’ he says, sounding a little exasperated, apparently unable to see what everyone else can: namely, that it seems against the laws of nature for two such beautiful people not to have had sex at least once. The last scene that Elwes shot was of him and Wright kissing on horseback, creating ‘the most perfect kiss’ of all time against a sunset. Surely that was romantic?

‘Well, not really. Robin and I were friends by that point so we kept laughing, and [the director] Rob [Reiner] was going, “Touch her face, touch her face!”’ He laughs.

But Westley and Buttercup’s love is only a part of the film, and only one of several love stories in the film. There is also, for a start, the great love between Inigo and Fezzik. The scene in which a drunken and broken Inigo looks up into Fezzik’s face in the Thieves Forest, and Fezzik says a simple, smiling hello, is much more moving than the moment when Buttercup realises the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually Westley (after, unfortunately, she’s pushed him down a hill). Even if Inigo does become the Dread Pirate Roberts at the end of the film, as Westley suggests he should, it is as impossible to imagine him going off without Fezzik as it is to imagine Buttercup and Westley being severed.

This love between the two men is at the root of one of the film’s subtlest lessons. Bad guys teach audiences how to think of opponents in life, and this is especially true of bad guys in books and films aimed at kids. Because stories for kids tend to be relatively simple, villains in these films are almost invariably evil, and that’s all there is to be said about them. Cruella de Vil, Snow White’s stepmother, the witch in ‘Rapunzel’: WHAT a bunch of moody cows. This is also certainly true of movies for children in the 1980s, from the frankly terrifying Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) in
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
to the enjoyably evil Ursula in
The Little Mermaid
. It’s a pleasingly basic approach, and one that validates most kids’ (and adults’) view of the world: ‘I am good and anyone who thwarts me is wicked and there is no point in trying to think about things from their point of view because they have no inner life of their own beyond pure evil and a desire to impede me.’
The Princess Bride
, however, does something different.

It’s easy to forget this once you’ve seen the movie and fallen in love with the characters but Inigo and Fezzik are, ostensibly, bad guys. When we first meet them in the movie, they knock our heroine, Buttercup, unconscious and kidnap her for Vizzini. We are also told they will kill her. In the eyes of children, you can’t get much more evil than that. They are hired guns in the revenge business, which is not a job for a good guy in any fairy tale. But Goldman flips it around. We quickly see Inigo and, in particular, Fezzik being extremely sweet with each other, doing their little rhymes together and trying to protect one another from Vizzini’s ire. Their love for one another shows us there is more to these villains than villainy. Goldman then ups the ante even further by having Inigo describe to the Man in Black how he has devoted his life to avenging the death of his father, thus giving him the kind of emotional backstory kids can definitely understand, as well as adding another mission to the movie. Soon after beating (but not killing) Inigo, the Man in Black fights with Fezzik who we already know has a similarly sad past (‘unemployed – IN GREENLAND’).

Plenty of villains were once good before crossing to the dark side: Darth Vader, many of Batman’s nemeses, Voldemort. The point in those stories is that the difference between true evil and true greatness comes down to one wrong decision, one wrong turn, and there is no going back from that. But
The Princess Bride
does something more subtle: it suggests that good people sometimes end up doing bad things, but are still good, have stories of their own and are capable of love. Inigo and Fezzik both killed people in the past for Vizzini, but they’re all still good people. This is quite a message for kids (and adults) to take in: not everything is clear-cut when it comes to good and bad, even in fairy tales.

In the original novel, William Goldman goes into much greater detail about Fezzik and Inigo’s friendship, and this is one of the reasons why I – in all honesty – prefer the book to the film.
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But the film alludes to it enough in order for audiences to understand the real bond between the men, and partly this happens through the script and partly through the actors, especially one actor in particular.

At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fezzik, but, thank heavens, he was already too expensive by the time the film finally started shooting. Where Schwarzenegger is all jarring rectangles and jutting jaw, André the Giant was all soft circles and goofy smiles. Where Schwarzenegger palpably punished himself to a superhuman extent to get the body he clearly wanted so badly, the man born André René Roussimoff suffered from gigantism due to acromegaly and had no choice about his size, just as Fezzik didn’t, much to the latter’s misery (‘It’s not my fault being the biggest and the strongest – I don’t even exercise’). It would be a patronising cliché to say André was born to play Fezzik, but he was certainly more right for the role than Schwarzenegger.

By the time he made
The Princess Bride
, André was seven foot four inches and weighed over 540 pounds. Easily the sweetest stories in Cary Elwes’s book come from the cast and crew’s memories of the wrestler who died in 1993 at the age of forty-six, and this is not mere sentimentality. Quite a few of
The Princess Bride
’s cast have, sadly, since died, including Mel Smith, Peter Cook and Peter Falk, but none of them prompts the same kind of fondness as that felt for André. ‘It’s safe to say that he was easily the most popular person on the movie,’ Elwes writes. ‘Everyone just loved him.’

Partly this is due to the extraordinary nature of the man. Robin Wright recalls going out to dinner with him where he ate ‘four or five entrees, three or four appetizers, a couple of baskets of bread, and then he’s like, I’m ready for seconds. And then desserts. I think he went through a case of wine and he wasn’t even tipsy.’

But it was André’s innately gentle nature that made him so beloved. His ‘compassion and protective nature’, Elwes writes, helped Wallace Shawn overcome his almost paralysing fear of heights when they were filming the climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. When Robin Wright felt chilly when filming outdoors, André would place one of his huge hands on top of Wright’s head. ‘She said it was like having a giant hot water bottle up there. It certainly did the trick; he didn’t even mess up her hair that much!’ Elwes writes. When he died, William Goldman wrote his obituary in
New York
magazine. The last lines were as follows: ‘André once said to Billy Crystal, “We do not live long, the big and the small.”

Alas.

Next, on a smaller level, is the love between Miracle Max (Crystal) and his aged wife, Valerie (Carol Kane). Initially they seem simply like a squabbling old couple, playing purely for broad comedy (and their scene is the broadest comedic one in the film). But it soon becomes clear that Valerie is only needling Max because she wants him to get back his confidence in his work after Prince Humperdinck destroyed it by sacking them, and her little cheer when her husband agrees to make a miracle for Inigo is really very touching. By the end of their scene, they’re working together, finishing one another’s sentences, holding each other arm-in-arm and whispering little asides to one another. As a portrait of elderly marriage goes, this one is a pretty lovely one.

Finally, there’s the great love story that frames the whole movie: the one between the grandson/Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and the grandfather/Columbo (Peter Falk). In the beginning of the movie, the grandson is irritated by his cheek-pinching grandfather and can hardly believe that he has to stop playing his adorably primitive-looking computer baseball game to listen to grandfather read a book.
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As the film progresses, the relationship between the grandson and grandfather progresses almost like a traditional love story: the grandson slowly gets more interested, clutching his covers anxiously when Buttercup is almost eaten by the Shrieking Eels; then he gets angry, banging his bed with his fist when it seems like Westley has been killed; and finally, he comes round entirely and tells his grandfather to come back the next day to read the book again.

‘As you wish.’ His grandfather smiles, and the film ends.

‘That wasn’t actually in the script,’ Elwes says. ‘They came up with him saying that on, I think, the last day, and it really captures the love between the grandfather and grandson. You can also see the tenderness between Fred Savage and Peter Falk.’

In Elwes’s book, Savage recalls how comfortable Falk made him: ‘I don’t even remember when we were shooting or when we weren’t. He would sit in that chair, and I would be in the bed, and he would talk to me all day … He just kind of became my grandfather.’

This relationship feels especially significant because the reason this film exists is because of the bond between particular parents and their children. Rob Reiner first came across the book when it was given to him by his father, the comedian and actor Carl Reiner. Elwes, too, was given the novel when he was thirteen by his stepfather, and his love for the book made him especially determined to get the role. And most of all, the reason the book was written in the first place was because of the love one father felt for his children. Back in 1970, William Goldman decided to write a story for his two daughters, then seven and four years old, to entertain them while he was away in Los Angeles working on a movie: ‘I said to them both, “I’ll write you a story, what do you want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides”. “Then that will be the title,” I told them. And so it has remained.’

Goldman has written a frankly ridiculous number of acclaimed novels (
Marathon Man
), screenplays (
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
,
All the President’s Men
,
Misery
) and memoirs (
Adventures in the Screen Trade
,
Which Lie Did I Tell?
). But his favourite thing he ever wrote, he has said, is
The Princess Bride
. He lovingly turned it into a script in 1973, and then watched it languish for thirteen years, rejected by studio heads who all said the same thing: they loved it, but it was unfilmable. When it was finally picked up by Rob Reiner, Goldman was so anxious that Rob had to reshoot scenes because Goldman, standing behind the camera, was praying that the film would turn out OK and his prayers were picked up by the microphone.

‘Please understand that this is a very personal project for me. Normally I don’t care much for any of my work. But this one is different. It is my favourite thing I’ve ever written in my life. So if I appear a little nervous, that’s the reason,’ Goldman told the cast.

The Princess Bride
is funny, and exciting, and scary, and funny, and silly, and sweet, and funny (I might have mentioned that). But the reason it has endured is because it is such a warm film, one without cynicism or calculation, and a film as lovely as this one could only have been born out of love itself – all kinds of love.

And yet, this is also the reason the film was initially deemed something of a damp squib. While not a bomb, the movie was certainly not the commercial success it should have been – and would, eventually, become. But because the film isn’t aimed at one particular demographic, exemplified by its multi-layered depiction of love, the studio simply had no idea how to market it, or even who to aim it at. After all, it features a simply fairy-tale love, but also a deeper love about friendship, one about grandparents and grandchildren, and then a pair of squabbling geriatrics: who on earth is it aimed at? The correct answer, of course, is ‘everyone’, but that is not an answer movie marketing departments understand. For all that I despair of the way movies are marketed and targeted today, it’s not like they always got it right in the eighties either. Despite the movie being one of the most exciting films ever made, the studio marketed it with one of the most boring posters of all time, featuring a silhouette of Kevin Arnold listening to Columbo read a book. Not even I especially want to see a movie featuring just that.

‘Rob unfurled the poster on the way back from the Toronto Film Festival on the plane and we all gathered around and we thought, Gosh, there’s not even a sign of Fezzik! How can anyone know what the movie’s about without Fezzik?’ recalls Cary Elwes, understandably still bemused. How could any marketing department see a film featuring a real live actual giant, and then leave the giant off the film poster, for heaven’s sake?

The theatrical trailer was even worse and was quickly pulled from cinemas, and if you look it up on YouTube you’ll see why.

‘The movie opened the same weekend as
Fatal Attraction
and nobody went. The cast and crew were all pretty surprised and bummed but Goldman had warned us this might happen,’ says Elwes. ‘He said, “Look, this is an oddball movie so it’s going to be a tough sell. I won’t lie to you, I’ve been through it, for more than a decade.”’