By Valerie Estelle Frankel
SUNNYVALE, California — A film such as Snow White and the Three Stooges (yes, this is real and available) features the Stooges doing slapstick while the central couple lead a rebellion against the evil queen and fall in love. This is the nature of many Jewish comedies—the writers, often Jewish, depict the Jews as the sidekicks and the central heroes as the Gentiles. This tradition goes back to the oldest days of Hollywood, when Jews created a new industry willing to employ them but tried to blend in by changing their names and keeping Jewish fiction to a minimum. (The same happened in comics and science fiction, but that’s another story.)
While the sixties saw a boom in Jewish culture (the Fiddler and Yentl movies, the Anne Frank play, Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, etc.) the tradition of covertly Jewish characters continued for decades more. And that brings us to The Princess Bride. Blond, British Wesley and his peasant-to-princess Buttercup read as goyish. They’re the heroes, fighting the spoiled prince who won’t let them fall in love. However, basically every other character reads as a European ethnic minority –if not Jewish then honorary mishpucha.
The 1987 film is directed by comedy legend Rob Reiner, produced by Reiner, Andrew Scheinman, and Norman Lear, written by William Goldman, with music by Mark Knopfler. In front of the camera are many more Jews playing Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), and the narrators of the boy (Fred Savage) and his grandfather (Peter Falk), while even Cary Elwes and Christopher Guest have Jewish ancestry.
Vizzini, Inigo, and Fezzik (Andre the Giant) team up as loveably neutral rogues with heavy ethnic accents who have to take up odd jobs, including murder, to get by. They also get many of the most hilarious gags and memorable lines. Wallace Shawn describes his character as “40 percent me, 10 percent Rob Reiner, and 20 percent Danny DeVito” (Elwes 158). The book takes place in Florin, a European country battling Guilder (these are actually an Italian and German coin respectively), thus placing us in an imaginary land. At the same time, the trio hail from Sicily, Greenland and Spain. As such, this becomes generic Europe, though with Wesley, Buttercup, and the prince identified as locals with the trio cast as foreigners.
Even sillier and more Jewish are comedians Billy Crystal and Carol Kane as Miracle Max and his wife Valerie. Together, they steal the show with a quick five minutes of ad-libbed bickering shtick. Max, a doctor, has been fired by the prince and won’t stop kvetching about it in a way familiar to Mel Brooks fans. Reiner’s script note actually read, “If Mel Brooks’s 2000-year-Old Man was really old, he’d resemble this guy” (Elwes 163). Cary Elwes explains that Billy Crystal brought in two pictures for his look – Casey Stengel and his own grandmother. From there, Crystal hammed it up. “For three days straight and ten hours a day, Billy improvised thirteenth-century period jokes, never saying the same thing or the same line twice. Such was the hilarity of his ad-libbing that he actually caused Mandy to injure himself while fighting to suppress the need to laugh” (Elwes 165). After they filmed repeatedly different goofy versions, the “mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich” made the cut as did suggestion that the adventurers give Max a paper cut and pour lemon juice on it. The 2020 Zoom table read added Max’s request for a Cel-Ray tonic (presumably cut for time). Fussing like a Jewish mother, Valerie adds that anyone revived should wait an hour before swimming. The book reveals that the pair are named after the pretend author S. Morgenstern’s parents and they certainly act like it. Goldman (annotating as himself) writes in the “The Wedding” chapter of the book:
One last thing: Hiram, my editor, felt the Miracle Max section was too Jewish in sound, too contemporary. I really let him have it on that one; it’s a very sore point with me…if Max and Valerie sound Jewish, why shouldn’t they? You think a guy named Simon Morgenstern was Irish Catholic?
Even Wesley, who masquerades behind a mask to get his girl, adapts from his old peasant self to a swashbuckler through hard work and diligent study. Combining this with his original plan of immigrating to America where there’s no class system and saving up to bring his wife over, and there’s more than a little callback to the Jewish experience in America—based in ignoring class barriers, redefining oneself and building up a career. The story also throws in the dual identity stories of Clark Kent or Captain America—that an overlooked schlub is a great hero underneath.
Of course, a villain that plays into negative Jewish stereotypes is problematic, but a cowardly mad scientist working for the royalty behind the scenes to start a war does hit some of those buttons. Count Rugen’s line, “Get some rest; if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything” is also very Jewish-mother. Vizzini as the short, super-genius poisoner likewise has an antisemitic vibe. Likewise, Prince Humperdinck (though a super-aristocrat and gigantically overweight in the novel), is slimly dark in the film and insists he’s too worn out from scheming to help with the labor. As the representation people say, if you have to have a villain like these, at least have some positive ones from the same background for balance. With so many Jewish-vibing characters, at least this is accomplished.
Jewish author William Goldman wrote the screenplay based on his original 1973 novel. In the latter, his ethnic father is trying to share his favorite book from the old country, but must translate it for his American son, as the William Goldman character must do for his own son. These fathers remember the humor but not the long dull genealogies and legalisms that must be edited out…Jews may certainly recognize their literary heritage of Torah and Talmud here. As the father explains, “Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues.” This too is familiar from legends of Sholom Aleichem and other European-American celebrity authors. At last, Goldman adapts this long, ponderous text into a “good parts version”—like Stories from the Bible instead of the bible itself.
My favorite line of so many goes to Fezzik’s mother in the book, Wesley in the film: “Life is pain – anyone who says differently is selling something.” Like so much of the story it has a subtly Jewish vibe in its pessimistic but funny outlook. In the end, for all those wondering what Jewish fantasy looks like…The Princess Bride is a really fun answer.
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NOTES
Goldman, William. 1973. The Princess Bride. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Elwes, Cary. As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride. Touchstone, 2014.
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Valerie Estelle Frankel is the author of over 80 books on pop culture. She’s the series editor of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy for Lexington Press and author of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy before 1945 (2021) with more to follow. www.vefrankel.com