Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
I think I first stumbled across The Spanish Prisoner less because it’s a David Mamet film and more as part of a search to find something that Steve Martin isn’t unwatchably awful in. It turns out, unbelievable as it may seem, that there’s at least two such films. But that’s a different episode.
Campbell Scott’s engineer Joe Ross is whisked away to the exotic island of Val Verde to meet with his corporate high muckety-mucks about the potentially incredible value of the process he has just finalised. I believe it was the process for refining McGuffinium to Unobtainium, and we can all imagine how profitable that would be. He’s here with his day-to-day co-workers, Ricky Jay’s company lawyer George Lang and Rebecca Pidgeon’s secretary Susan, who seems quite taken with Joe.
While there, he meets and befriends Steve Martin’s wealthy stranger Julian “Jimmy” Dell, who he comes to trust so much that when Dell asks him to carry a package back to his sister in New York he agrees without even questioning what the contents are. Still, Susan’s prompting sees him open it to find out that Dell apparently on the up and up, and serious about introducing him to her sister.
This friendship would appear to come into its own when the company appears to be positioning themselves to screw Joe out of any bonus or cut in the proceeds of the process, so Joe asks for Dell’s advice, which is of course just another domino in a chain started long ago. Now, I don’t think anyone is best served by a blow by blow plot recap from this point on – Wikipedia is over there if you need it – other than to say Joe does indeed lose the process and his attempts to regain it, and escape from the frame job he’s been put in will see him in ever increasing danger as he runs out of people to trust.
I first watched this a long time ago, maybe even before seeing Glengarry Glen Ross, so the Mametian dialogue was something of a revelation at the time. It’s less so now, of course – Glengarry is where that style of speech worked as a chorus, here it’s a couple of good verses (Martin, Scott) with occasional off-key screeching (Rebecca Pidgeon). Still if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like, and thankfully I am a fan of Mamet’s affectations, although it won’t change anyone’s mind if they’re not so fond of it.
I’ve also now rewatched this enough over my long decades and decades on this accursed planet that it’s certainly past the point of diminishing returns and into actively hurting it territory, so I’m not sure how I’d react if watching this cold. Certainly my first viewing was enhanced by not having quite the level of cynicism I do now when approaching movies like this, and I’d perhaps have been less impressed with the plot if I’d applied my now standard operating protocol of “assume everyone is not who they claim to be”. That would certainly throw into rather starker relief the failure points of this multilayered con, which is altogether too fragile to exist outside of a cinema. But that’s rather the case with a lot of the genre, I suppose.
Even so, I still like Campbell Scott’s performance, and indeed still wonder why he never had quite the break I feel he deserved in his career, and Steve Martin still manages to surprise me to this day by not being awful here. In fact, he’s quite good. Turns out it’s just that comedy stuff he can’t do without making my teeth grind into a fine powder. I think, despite my earlier protestations, that on a first view there’s enough densely layered, ultimately silly cons and twists going on to keep this entertaining, so I’m still going to recommend this, albeit not as vociferously as I might have done had you asked me something back in the nineties.