It's interesting that this poster looks exactly like a Maxfield Parrish painting, all pillars and distant mountains and delicate pink dawnlight. Visually, thank goodness, that's not what the film is like at all, which would have tilted the whole thing over into saccharine camp. Instead we have what I can only call an incredibly "cinematic" movie - simply because it looks so much like a movie. The sets are well designed, but they still look like sets.

This artificiality is mirrored in the story, which takes the romantic ideal of larger-than-life characters and just runs with it - and runs and runs and runs, and keeps running. Inigo isn't just a good swordsman; he's the best swordsman alive. Fezzik is the strongest man you could find if you searched the whole earth. Humperdinck is the greatest hunter. Vizzini is the most charismatic leader of men anywhere, such that only he can seize on the talents of Inigo and Fezzik and turn them to his own purposes (and that's a crucial point; to notice only his inflated opinion of his intelligence is to miss the point of the character).

All this is more explicit in the book, but it comes through quite well in the movie even when it's not stated. This is not a story of ordinary mortals. This bunch of lovable eccentrics collectively represent the pinnacle of human achievement.

And along comes one perfect man, and beats them all.

It's on that level that the grandfather in the framing device initially sells the story to his grandson, who wanted to know whether it contained "sports," suggesting that it was primarily about men who achieved maximum greatness. But then it turns out that the central character is a woman, Buttercup. Buttercup is criticized for being too passive, and that's a quite valid criticism, but her function in the story is to be rather than to act: to be the most beautiful woman in the world and the most passionate lover, until Westley out-loves her just as he outdoes everyone else. It's true that this is a male-dominated vision of love, for in that sense Buttercup is another of Westley's conquests. But since true love is the main theme of the story, simply by being a lover Buttercup gains a stature far above that of the other men.

The grandson, meanwhile, is driven by this story to accept that among the achievements of humanity in its perpetual striving towards greatness, an aspiration that he shares with his whole heart, the greatest is love. And so, done protesting at the intrusion of this foreign element in his story of masculine adventure, he listens peacefully while, to all the incredible achievements of this story's titanic cast of impossible heroes, is added the greatest achievement of all: a kiss.

And not just any kiss, but the most passionate kiss in the history of the world.