ABSTRACT
A romantic, “wrong man” thriller, The Spanish Prisoner, his fifth film as writer/director, is the perfect vehicle for an extended examination of the gamesmanship and conartistry that characterize the best of David Mamet’s work. Although Mamet has transformed a wretched childhood into deeply affecting dramas, such as The Cryptogram and The Old Neighborhood, he has made a name in theater and film by magically turning crime into art. In Spanish Prisoner, his most intricate and arguably his most arresting Hitchcockian fable, Mamet weaves a web of intrigue in which the lines between business and crime are blurred, a paradigmatic structure employed in both stage and screenplays. Mamet’s original screenplay leads Everyman figure Joe Ross, a brilliant ideas man blinded by ambition and greed, into the confidences of Jimmy Dell, a process by which Ross is conned out of his lucrative business strategy and doubly gulled by those he trusts through a method that Richard Combs recognized in Mamet’s House of Games as “complicated pieces of trickery…coalesce[d] into one master con” (17). Here, the high stakes trickery played upon a credulous company man-albeit reminiscent of Mamet’s earlier Water Engine and Homicide-invites assessment of the psychological process and moral ambiguities inherent in Mamet’s presentation of confidence games. As the audience is led willingly down the garden path, much as the aspiring Joe Ross is duped out of his most valuable possessions-his billion dollar formula and his innocence-Mamet plays fast and lose with the motifs of intelligence, innocence, and invention and myriad interpretations of security, including risks, safeguards, sanctuaries, and contracts (both real and fictitious). Thus, confidence tricksters trade upon Ross’s trust, capitalize on his vulnerability, and make a killing on his unconscious complicity. The game as it is played by the filmmaker hooks the mark and the audience, the latter trapped by the lure of the labyrinthine plot and its own tendency to autosuggest in ways that seem logical but are inherently false. Indeed, as the filmmaker recently remarked, “We have the capacity to use our great intelligence to convince ourselves of anything in the world, true or false” (qtd. in Caro 2).
