Rob Reiner’s 1987 film, The Princess Bride, has become a modern classic thanks to its clever wordplay and twists on timeworn fairytale tropes. But what sets it apart from even the most irreverent and challenging modern children’s entertainment, such as Shrek or Harry Potter, is that it risks putting its characters in truly frightening situations with malice in the air, rather than cartoonish, bloodless, or off-screen mayhem.
For the most part, those risks pay off. To children, Inigo Montoya might be just a swashbuckling swordsman with a fantastic mustache and a desire to avenge his father’s death. However, there’s an implied horror to Inigo’s story about the six-fingered man killing the elder Montoya and slashing eleven-year-old Inigo’s face that only adult viewers can fully appreciate. And when Inigo finally confronts the six-fingered man and disarms him, he forces the villain to beg for mercy before thrusting a sword through his chest and calling him a son-of-a-bitch. Name another children’s movie featuring a vengeance execution. That Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman pull it off without a screeching shift in tone is a testament to their skillful storytelling.
However, the movie fails in one important respect which, once I noticed, ruined much of it for me: The Princess Bride is unrepentantly sexist. Lest you think its sexism is merely one of the aforementioned twists on timeworn fairytale tropes, it isn’t. Rather, the movie makes clear that women’s value lies in how much men, specifically, value their beauty and loyalty, not their character. Worse, it makes clear that when a woman acts affirmatively on her own behalf, she will be punished. Harshly.