The Princess Bride is perhaps the only book in which I think the movie was better. That being said, the book was still pretty good, but the movie is one of my all-time favorites. Both the book and the movie have heavily influenced my humorous fantasy fiction writing.
In the movie, a grandfather reads The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern to his sick grandson. The novel version also has this dual story line, but a father reading to his son, a fictionalized version of the actual author, William Goldman. The idea in the novel and movie is that the historical Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern is from some renaissance era in the fictional country of Florin. In the novel, the whole book is not read to him, but only the good parts. Are you confused yet? You will be when reading the novel.
The movie does keep this story within a story very clean, focusing more on the fairy tale with just a tad of the child Goldman. The book adds much more to both stories, but especially to the fictionalized William Goldman story line. Goldman talks about hearing the story as a child but also his discovery that his father left huge parts out. Then, it has Goldman’s fictional path to writing an abridged version of the book and making the movie. I enjoyed the additions to the fairy tale, but just like Goldman’s fiction father, I would leave out the boring parts of the modern-day world.
So, now that you have the surface story, I’ll talk about the fairy tale. The Princess Bride is about a girl named Buttercup and a farm boy named Wesley. The two grow up together and fall in love, but Wesley goes off to make his fortune so that they can marry. He gets lost at sea, and Buttercup mourns for him. She is then selected to be Prince Humperdink’s future bride, but she is unhappy. She gets kidnapped, kidnapped again, finds her true love, losses him, gets forced into a marriage that doesn’t really happen, and then rescued. While that is happening, there is giants, cliffs of insanity, miracles that don’t quite work, riddles, and amazing sword fights. It is a hilarious and beautiful story. Since I saw the movie first, every line sounds in my mind like the actors who played the various parts.
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