The Princess Bride

All good parodies love what they’re parodying. This makes the jokes a bit of self-deprecating teasing, and ensures the audience – fans of the tropes and cliches – don’t feel insulted for liking things even as they know they’re flawed. All great parodies are also excellent examples of what they’re parodying.

Few understand this quite like Mel Brooks, which is why nobody has had a more successful career in parody film than him. I’m sure I’ll end up writing about some of his work on this site at some point – Men in Tights makes me laugh every time I see it. Blazing Saddles is often considered his finest because it’s parodying an entire genre rather than an individual film or series, and doing it so effectively that it basically killed the classic style of Hollywood Western that was so dominant for over half a century. It’s a seminal work in general, but especially in the field of parody.

The Princess Bride, however, achieves something that even Blazing Saddles couldn’t – it delivers the same cliches it mocks, sometimes in the same scene, and makes them feel warm, familiar, and wonderful. It points out the flaws in the tropes and then reminds you why we love them anyway. For that, I think The Princess Bride may be the best film ever made.

(It’s certainly one of the most quotable, though reducing it to that does it a disservice.)

The duel between Westley and Inigo is a perfect example. The elaborate courtesy, the discussion of technique, and the successive revelations about which hand each man prefers are very funny, and a great send-up of the over-the-top nature of duels in fantasy. They are also excellent ingredients for a thrilling sword fight. Each escalation tells us something about the men, alters the balance between them, and makes the contest more exciting. Their pleasure in finding a worthy opponent is infectious. I want the fight to continue, and I don’t particularly want either of them to lose.

That’s a much better joke about swashbuckling than simply having a supposedly great swordsman fall over. The scene understands the attraction of grace, bravado, and skill so well that it can exaggerate all three and still deliver the goods. I would happily put it up against sword fights in films taking themselves far more seriously.

The same affection runs through the romance. Westley and Buttercup belong to an absurd world, and the obstacles between them are gloriously excessive. The film is quite willing to laugh at the presentation of true love, and how it’s treated as the solution for all ills; but it still wants them to get each other back. Rob Reiner and William Goldman mock the cliche of happy endings in fairy tales without treating the audience as foolish for wanting one, and without disappointing them by denying it.

Inigo’s character and arc are perhaps the best case study of all. His introduction has become so quotable that it’s easy to hear the familiar rhythm before thinking about what he is saying. We’re invited – repeatedly – to chuckle at the swordsman who has practised what he will say when he meets the six-fingered man, despite his lack of any real plan on how to find him, fight him, or anything else. But his revenge matters. When he finally does face the man he’s spent his life pursuing, the film lets that same line go from a joke to something to be cheered, shouted alongside Inigo – not least because of Mandy Patinkin’s stellar delivery giving that moment the weight it needs. I don’t stop caring about Inigo because I have spent so much of the film laughing with him – I care more because I feel like I know him.

Even the framing story knows how this works. The boy listening to his grandfather is suspicious of the kissing and impatient with the bits he doesn’t want. His interruptions let the film acknowledge those objections without surrendering to them. Watching him get drawn in is part of the pleasure. The story earns an audience who did not particularly want to be told it – the one who doesn’t understand why people like these things and would most appreciate the mockery has learned why, and been brought into the fold as a fellow fan.

So why not five stars? Well, four stars is a must-watch, a genre-definer – The Princess Bride is certainly both of those. But it won’t fundamentally change your appreciation of cinema. Five stars is the realm of Shakespeare’s finest plays or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – inarguably defining language and music well beyond their original domains. The Princess Bride didn’t invent fantasy romance, or parody, or fantasy romance parody. But it’s executed beautifully.

Scant few films give me this much comedy, adventure, and feeling with so little wasted time. The jokes make the fairy tale more enjoyable, and the fairy tale gives the jokes something worth being about. If you want to parody a genre, The Princess Bride is the gold standard.