The Princess Bride book vs movie: Reiner cut an entire chapter — and the book doesn't end where the film does

The Princess Bride ought to be the least contentious book-versus-film debate going, given that William Goldman adapted his own 1973 novel and Rob Reiner treated the material like holy writ. And yet. Have a proper look at the two side by side and you'll find Reiner excised an entire chapter — the biggest set piece in the book — whilst Goldman's novel carries on past the film's final frame into rather bleaker territory.

The chapter that didn't survive

In the novel, Westley isn't held in the film's modest "Pit of Despair". He's locked in the Zoo of Death: a five-level underground menagerie beneath Prince Humperdinck's castle, stocked by floor — speed on one level, strength on another, poisoners further down — with the Machine waiting at the bottom. Inigo and Fezzik have to fight their way down level by murderous level to reach him. It's the book's grandest sequence, and Reiner cut the lot — partly budget, partly pace, entirely defensible and still a bit heartbreaking.

It's hardly the only casualty:

• Buttercup's bickering parents, a running double act in the book, vanish entirely from the film.
• The backstories shrink. Inigo's father and Fezzik's whole sorry childhood get long flashback chapters on the page; on screen they're compressed into a swordfight's worth of chat.
• The sharks became shrieking eels — one of the rare instances of the film out-inventing the book.
• The framing device got recast. The novel pretends to be Goldman's "good parts version" of a classic by the fictional S. Morgenstern, complete with a fictional wife and son; the film hands the whole apparatus to Peter Falk and a poorly grandson.

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The ending Goldman wouldn't sweeten

The film ends on the kiss — the one that left the previous five great kisses "behind". The book does not. After the escape on Humperdinck's whites, Goldman reports that Morgenstern ends on a pile-up of reversals: Inigo's wound reopening, Westley relapsing, Fezzik taking a wrong turn, Buttercup's horse throwing a shoe — and the Prince's men closing in. Goldman offers his personal opinion that the foursome got away, then takes it back by degrees, and closes the novel like this:

"But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."

So the film's last line is a kiss, and the book's last line is a shrug at mortality — same author, same story, two entirely different exits, and Goldman signed off on both.

He never quite left the joke alone, either. The 25th-anniversary edition added the opening chapter of a "sequel", Buttercup's Baby, attributed once again to poor Morgenstern. And Goldman stayed close to the film in the flesh: he was on set for the Fire Swamp shoot and, as Cary Elwes tells it in his memoir As You Wish, wrecked a take by shouting in a panic that Robin Wright's dress had caught fire. It had — it was meant to. It was in his script.

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