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15. The Princess Bride - The Chatty Duelists

“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.”

Never before has an action sequence relied so squarely on excellent dialogue as the initial swordfight in Rob Reiner’s classic 1987 William Goldman adaptation. The scene wastes no time using that dialogue to infuse its action with character, as Inigo helps enemy-soon-to-become-ally Westley up a cliffside because Inigo’s impatient to start the fight.

If #37 introduces how to reveal character through action, this is that scene on crack. Before the fight even begins, we learn the codes of honor by which these duelists operate, a civility that carries over into the actual swordplay. We get the backstory on Inigo and hear, for the first time in the film, the movie’s most famous line.

Once the fight begins, we see how equally matched they are not only through their swordplay, but by how they talk about it, name-checking famous fencing strategies (actual period maneuvers researched by Goldman), a rare instance where showing AND telling pays off, because it lets us know these are the type of people to talk about their chess game while they play it.

This choice is important because it reveals the joy they take in swordplay for its own pleasure, and that joy infects the audience. You get the sense that even if Westley didn’t need to get past Inigo to save Buttercup, they’d spar anyway for fun, or go looking for a pick-up duel.

Another near-revolutionary aspect of this sequence is its post-modernism. Before there was Shrek, there was The Princess Bride. What Scream would become to horror, The Princess Bride already was to fairy tales almost ten years earlier. Creating a work that at once satirizes and exemplifies a genre is no mean feat, and there’s hardly been better before or since.

This sequence exemplifies that balance, with self-commentary (the aforementioned swordplay analysis and Inigo’s crack about there being little money in revenge) and action both ridiculous (the needless flips and swordcatching) and sublime (that hand-switching move Westley does right before he defeats Inigo is straight-up bad-ass). The pinnacle of this combo, of course, comes when Westley reveals that he, too, is not left-handed. When I saw this moment for the first time in a sneak preview (having no idea what the film was), the audience burst into applause.

Another revolution predicted by this sequence is the age of the stunt double-less fight scene (at least in America - in Hong Kong, that was already standard). After The Matrix, it became de riguer for actors to spend months training with some Wuxia artist to master all sorts of sweet Kung Fu moves or learn how to fence, but Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes were spending the better part of a year learning their moves a decade before it was cool. The only stuntmen in this sequence are the ones doing the flips. (If you think about it, that means the actors had to learn how to swordfight ambidextrously. Damn.)

In the screenplay, William Goldman describes this sequence as the “second greatest swordfight in film history,” following that with “the first comes later.” For Rob Reiner’s money (and mine, too) the better one comes first.

Contains more than you need, but you get the point.

See also: The rest of The Princess Bride, Erroll Flynn provides the template for Westley in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. performs “the most thrilling swordfight ever filmed” (at least according to the tagline) in The Prisoner of Zenda.

Next: A horrible movie spawns our highest-rated duel.