The Chatty Duel

tags: The Chatty Duel, The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Hollywood, film, offbeat, streaming video

For this week's Silly Saturday, I am sharing this video of the fight between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Inigo (Mandy Patinkin) from the Princess Bride. It's actually funny to watch these two chat while sword fighting.

I thought these lines were quite amusing:

"You've done nothing but study swordplay?"

"More pursue than study lately.. you see, I can no' find him. It's been 20 years now, I'm starting to lose confidence. I just work for Vizzini to pay the bills. There's not a lot of money in revenge..."

Although Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin did learn to fence (both left- and right-handed) for the film (reportedly spending all their free time during the production practicing with fencing instructor Bob Anderson and with each other), the actual swordfight scene between them was filmed using two separate, mirror-imaged, sets, allowing the illusion that they were equally skilled with either hand. They actually performed all of the fencing in the swordfight scene, however; stunt doubles were used only for the two somersaults. This amount of time spent practicing came in handy for Elwes, who later starred -- and used his fencing skills -- in the film Glory and in the Mel Brooks movie Robin Hood: Men In Tights, notably against Roger Rees, and even going so far as to call out, 'Parry, parry, thrust, thrust -- good!' [Wikipedia].