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 B

him the kind of emotional backstory kids can definitely understand, as well as adding another mission to the movie. Soon after beating (but not killing) Inigo, the Man in Black fights with Fezzik who we already know has a similarly sad past (‘unemployed – IN GREENLAND’).
    Plenty of villains were once good before crossing to the dark side: Darth Vader, many of Batman’s nemeses, Voldemort. The point in those stories is that the difference between true evil and true greatness comes down to one wrong decision, one wrong turn, and there is no going back from that. But The Princess Bride does something more subtle: it suggests that good people sometimes end up doing bad things, but are still good, have stories of their own and are capable of love. Inigo and Fezzik both killed people in the past for Vizzini, but they’re all still good people. This is quite a message for kids (and adults) to take in: not everything is clear-cut when it comes to good and bad, even in fairy tales.
    In the original novel, William Goldman goes into much greater detail about Fezzik and Inigo’s friendship, and this is one of the reasons why I – in all honesty – prefer the book to the film. fn8 But the film alludes to it enough in order for audiences to understand the real bond between the men, and partly this happens through the script and partly through the actors, especially one actor in particular.
    At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fezzik, but, thank heavens, he was already too expensive by the time the film finally started shooting. Where Schwarzenegger is all jarring rectangles and jutting jaw, André the Giant was all soft circles and goofy smiles. Where Schwarzenegger palpably punished himself to a superhuman extent to get the body he clearly wanted so badly, the man born André René Roussimoff suffered from gigantism due to acromegaly and had no choice about his size, just as Fezzik didn’t, much to the latter’s misery (‘It’s not my fault being the biggest and the strongest – I don’t even exercise’). It would be a patronising cliché to say André was born to play Fezzik, but he was certainly more right for the role than Schwarzenegger.
    By the time he made The Princess Bride , André was seven foot four inches and weighed over 540 pounds. Easily the sweetest stories in Cary Elwes’s book come from the cast and crew’s memories of the wrestler who died in 1993 at the age of forty-six, and this is not mere sentimentality. Quite a few of The Princess Bride ’s cast have, sadly, since died, including Mel Smith, Peter Cook and Peter Falk, but none of them prompts the same kind of fondness as that felt for André. ‘It’s safe to say that he was easily the most popular person on the movie,’ Elwes writes. ‘Everyone just loved him.’
    Partly this is due to the extraordinary nature of the man. Robin Wright recalls going out to dinner with him where he ate ‘four or five entrees, three or four appetizers, a couple of baskets of bread, and then he’s like, I’m ready for seconds. And then desserts. I think he went through a case of wine and he wasn’t even tipsy.’
    But it was André’s innately gentle nature that made him so beloved. His ‘compassion and protective nature’, Elwes writes, helped Wallace Shawn overcome his almost paralysing fear of heights when they were filming the climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. When Robin Wright felt chilly when filming outdoors, André would place one of his huge hands on top of Wright’s head. ‘She said it was like having a giant hot water bottle up there. It certainly did the trick; he didn’t even mess up her hair that much!’ Elwes writes. When he died, William Goldman wrote his obituary in New York magazine. The last lines were as follows: ‘André once said to Billy Crystal, “We do not live long, the big and the small.”
    Alas.
    Next, on a smaller level, is the love between Miracle Max (Crystal) and his aged wife, Valerie