Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman Page A

true love between Buttercup and Westley, and their most perfect kiss which leaves all the other kisses in the world behind. Both Elwes and Wright were so astonishingly beautiful when they made the film that, watching them, it’s hard to believe any love ever existed on this planet other than theirs. And they, rather pleasingly, were quite taken with one another. In his book, Elwes talks at length about how ‘smitten’ he was with Wright, and she says precisely the same about him: ‘I was absolutely smitten with Cary. So obviously that helped with our on-screen chemistry … It doesn’t matter how many years go by, I will love Cary forever.’
    Disappointingly, however, Elwes insists that they remained just friends. ‘Everyone asks if there was more!’ he says, sounding a little exasperated, apparently unable to see what everyone else can: namely, that it seems against the laws of nature for two such beautiful people not to have had sex at least once. The last scene that Elwes shot was of him and Wright kissing on horseback, creating ‘the most perfect kiss’ of all time against a sunset. Surely that was romantic?
    ‘Well, not really. Robin and I were friends by that point so we kept laughing, and [the director] Rob [Reiner] was going, “Touch her face, touch her face!”’ He laughs.
    But Westley and Buttercup’s love is only a part of the film, and only one of several love stories in the film. There is also, for a start, the great love between Inigo and Fezzik. The scene in which a drunken and broken Inigo looks up into Fezzik’s face in the Thieves Forest, and Fezzik says a simple, smiling hello, is much more moving than the moment when Buttercup realises the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually Westley (after, unfortunately, she’s pushed him down a hill). Even if Inigo does become the Dread Pirate Roberts at the end of the film, as Westley suggests he should, it is as impossible to imagine him going off without Fezzik as it is to imagine Buttercup and Westley being severed.
    This love between the two men is at the root of one of the film’s subtlest lessons. Bad guys teach audiences how to think of opponents in life, and this is especially true of bad guys in books and films aimed at kids. Because stories for kids tend to be relatively simple, villains in these films are almost invariably evil, and that’s all there is to be said about them. Cruella de Vil, Snow White’s stepmother, the witch in ‘Rapunzel’: WHAT a bunch of moody cows. This is also certainly true of movies for children in the 1980s, from the frankly terrifying Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to the enjoyably evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid . It’s a pleasingly basic approach, and one that validates most kids’ (and adults’) view of the world: ‘I am good and anyone who thwarts me is wicked and there is no point in trying to think about things from their point of view because they have no inner life of their own beyond pure evil and a desire to impede me.’ The Princess Bride , however, does something different.
    It’s easy to forget this once you’ve seen the movie and fallen in love with the characters but Inigo and Fezzik are, ostensibly, bad guys. When we first meet them in the movie, they knock our heroine, Buttercup, unconscious and kidnap her for Vizzini. We are also told they will kill her. In the eyes of children, you can’t get much more evil than that. They are hired guns in the revenge business, which is not a job for a good guy in any fairy tale. But Goldman flips it around. We quickly see Inigo and, in particular, Fezzik being extremely sweet with each other, doing their little rhymes together and trying to protect one another from Vizzini’s ire. Their love for one another shows us there is more to these villains than villainy. Goldman then ups the ante even further by having Inigo describe to the Man in Black how he has devoted his life to avenging the death of his father, thus giving