The Princess Bride 1987
Like most everyone else, I didn’t see The Princess Bride in the theaters. But I made up for it by buying it on VHS, then DVD, then Blu-ray, and most recently the Blu-ray from Criterion which was rescanned for better picture quality and included some nice extras. It is hard to say why this movie works so well. Certainly parts of it scream low budget and the cast didn’t have many big names. I think the framing story of the grandfather reading to the boy (also in the original book) is an important aspect since it clearly defines the main story as make believe. The princess story then doesn’t have to stand completely on its own. Also, the story makes fun of this kind of movie even while it is totally that kind of movie. Also some key parts are off-type. The villain, played by Wallace Shawn, is so mean and so smart and yet somehow so harmless. And his henchmen, who would usually just do his bidding without any development, are actually nice guys who basically carry the movie. Tasked with killing the Man in Black, Inigo insists first on saving him from the cliff and then, after he lets the Man in Black get his breath, fights him left handed to make the fight more even. Likewise, when Andre the Giant is to kill the Man in Black, he wants him to feel he is doing well first. These aren’t your usual henchmen. Also, the handsome prince isn’t a hero. By toying with the formula, the result is greatly improved. And each part is perfectly cast and performed. It has been my pleasure to introduce at least one of my nephews to the movie and it was great to see him exposed to all the great lines in the movie, quoting them all the next day. A happy customer! This is the kind of movie that could become as timeless as The Wizard of Oz, handed down from one generation to the next.
The Criterion edition of the movie really does look great, based on a 4K scan of the original film. I don’t doubt that in the next couple of years, a 4K edition of the movie will be issued and will look just as good or better. Even my previous Blu-ray version hinted that there was a much better version available because in the extras when they would show scenes of the movie, the scenes looked much better than if you watched the movie on the same disk. Previous versions included some pretty good extras and every five years, a new version would be released with updated interviews and reunions of the cast and crew. So there were already a lot of extras available. The Criterion edition comes in a nice cloth bound storybook Blu-ray case and has a couple of good essays in the pages of that book ("When I was your age, television was called books” so why shouldn’t this movie look like a book?). I watched the whole movie on Saturday and then on Sunday watched it again with the commentary featuring the writer William Goldman, the director Rob Reiner, the producer Andrew Scheinman and cast members Peter Falk and Billy Crystal. There is another audio track which features Rob Reiner reading parts of Goldman’s book that tie into what is happening in the movie (as usual, a lot of the book couldn’t be included in the movie, so the reading is highly abridged). I figure eventually I will just read the book myself. It seems a bit of a shame not to include other commentaries by film historians, the rest of the cast, or just people who loved the movie. The older disks have two separate commentaries by Rob Reiner and William Goldman.
Written: 11 Mar 2019
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital