7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The inventor of "the Process," a top-secret formula which promises to make his company unimaginably rich, becomes the target of an elaborate ruse to steal his invention.
Starring: Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Ricky JayThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (448 kbps)
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
David Mamet is a poet of deception. Most of his plays and original film scripts are studies in lying and
dissemblance. His famously staccato rhythms aren't just a mannerism; they draw attention to
how his characters use language to deceive and misdirect others (and, often, themselves). Mamet
is perfectly capable of writing a traditional hero who's stalwart and upright—think Eliot Ness in
The Untouchables—but his
greatest creations are the unrepentant cheaters like shady salesmen
Ricky Roma and Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross, or the suave con artist played by Joe
Mantegna in House of
Games, or the conniving film director in State and
Main, who redefines lying as "a
gift for fiction".
Ten years after the elaborate machinations of House of Games, his first film as writer/director,
Mamet returned to the art of the con in The Spanish Prisoner, where the grifters are even more
devious and almost no one is what they seem. Once again, Mamet worked closely with his
longtime friend, the master magician and archivist of hoaxes, Ricky Jay, who appeared in nearly
all of the director's films and also served as technical consultant. Jay, who died last year, cut a
unique figure on both stage and screen, with his rotund figure and instantly recognizable
voice. Mamet directed all of Jay's popular magic shows, and Jay returned the service by
educating the writer on some of the more obscure chapters in the history of tricksters and
mountebanks, of which Jay was a peerless student. (He self-published a learned journal on the
subject, until the effort and expense grew too much for him.)
The Spanish Prisoner takes its title from a venerable deception in which the mark is promised a
fabulous fortune and a gorgeous bride, if only he'll pay the expenses of smuggling them out of
the foreign country where they've been detained. The scheme has taken many forms—the
Nigerian Prince scam is a modern version—but Mamet's film descends to new depths of
larcenous gamesmanship. Released to theaters in 1987, The Spanish Prisoner was distributed by
Sony Pictures Classics, which issued the film on DVD in 1998. The rights have now been
acquired by home video newcomer Ammo Content, which has released the film on Blu-ray
(Ammo's first venture into the format).
The Spanish Prisoner was shot on film by Gabriel Beristain (Dolores Claiborne), whose lighting here gives everything a deceptively plain and mundane surface, in stark contrast to the stylized noirish darkness created by Mamet's more frequent collaborator, Juan Ruiz Anchía, when he photographed House of Games. Ammo Content has indicated that their 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been sourced from a recently created master, but if so the scan of the film source has been subjected to some unfortunate digital processing that should be a thing of the past. Artificial sharpening is evident throughout; although the edge enhancement is never so bad as to generate obvious halos, it does introduce minor digital noise that is most evident in solid backgrounds. Light grain reduction appears to have been applied, which would account for the fall-off in fine detail as one moves from closeups to medium shots and then to longer vistas. (Fortunately, most of the film plays out in closeups and medium shots.) On the plus side, blacks are solid and densities are consistent. The Spanish Prisoner's color scheme is realistic (Central Park and the subway look like they do in real life), with Mamet relying on his production and costume designers to supply color variety. Except for an occasional faded flesh tone, colors are accurately saturated. The image has been thoroughly cleaned of dirt, scratches and similar analog blemishes. Overall, this is a good, but not great, presentation of the film. While Ammo has relegated the 110-minute feature to a BD-25, the lack of extras has allowed it to achieve an average bitrate of 23.96 Mbps.
The Spanish Prisoner was released in Dolby Stereo, which has been encoded on Blu-ray as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. (A BDInfo scan indicates the presence of a Dolby Digital 2.0 track, but no such option appears on the disc's menu.) It's an effective track, clearly reproducing and prioritizing the dialogue—which is always paramount with a writer as deliberate as Mamet—and quietly underlaying the characters' utterances with essential sound effects. The dialogue's principal co-star, however, is the memorable score by Carter Burwell (a Coen Brothers regular), whose deceptively simple themes for The Spanish Prisoner stick in your head and help build the film's mood of queasy and growing unease. The Blu-ray track spreads the score neatly across the front soundstage and services it well.
The disc's only extra is the film's trailer (1.33:1; 480i; 2:19). Sony's earlier DVD was similarly bare.
All of the films Mamet wrote and directed involve lies and chicanery (with the exception of The Winslow Boy, which he adapted from a Terrence Rattigan play and is
almost a museum piece),
but he never made another with such intricate plotting and multi-layered deception. (His 2001
Heist comes closest—and was missing on Blu-ray at the time of this review, but has since been released by Sony.)
While The Spanish Prisoner may lack the psychological complexity of House of Games, with its morally
conflicted heroine, the film's
narrative mechanics are more elaborate, and they've been engineered with a precision that, like
the historical con of the title, keeps viewers on the hook until they're squeezed dry. Ammo
Content's Blu-ray has some video issues, but the film itself is so good that the disc comes highly
recommended.
2004
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