Even though I was around 11 or 12 when The Princess Bride came out, even as a child I understood that the culmination of this moment pictured above and played down below, was not triumph of a good guy beating the bad guy.
Montoya: My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
In a film with all kinds of broad humor, there was something in the intensity of both Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya) and Christopher Guest’s (Count Tyrone Rugen) performances, something very serious, something truly mortal that I was responding to. Inigo Montoya overcomes Count Tyrone Rugen, and begins slicing wounds into Count Tyrone. Each slice comes with Montoya telling Rugen to offer him money, wealth, land, everything.
Count Tyrone: All that I have and more.
Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count Tyrone: Anything you want.
Inigo Montoya grabs Count Tyrone’s raised arm and plunges his sword into his heart.
Montoya: I want my father back.
I was less happy that Christopher Guest’s character was killed as much as I was happy that Mandy Patankin’s Inigo Montoya was finally free of this terrible tragedy. I was too young to articulate these feelings at the time but I knew that my reaction to this swashbuckling fight scene was something new and more profound in my personal experience.
Many years back, Patinkin explained that scene and his whole performance in that film.
I lost my father in 1972. It just hit a chord with me… that I want my father back just like he does. And in my mind I feel that when I killed that six fingered man, I killed the cancer that killed my father, and for a moment he was alive… and my fairy tale came true.
Great movie.