Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

The Spanish Prisoner Blu-ray Movie Review

What Is "the Process" . . . for Cheats and Liars?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 17, 2019

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 valuable object that everyone wants in The Spanish Prisoner is something called "the Process", and Mamet never explains what it is or what it's for. It has something to do with mathematics, because it can be expressed in formulas written in a notebook by its creator, Joe Ross (Campbell Scott), who keeps the only copy securely locked in a safe at the unnamed company run by his employer, Mr. Klein (Ben Gazzara). We never learn what the company does, but it stands to make a fortune from the Process, and Joe expects a hefty bonus for his contribution.

When I first saw The Spanish Prisoner, I took "the Process" as a parody of movie MacGuffins—Psycho without the seventy grand stolen from the safe or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre without the gold. But Mamet was more prescient than I gave him credit for. The world stood on the verge of a financial system ruled by quants and their obscure calculations and proprietary trading formulas closely guarded by Wall Street giants and hedge funds making billions under the radar. Watch the famous janga scene in The Big Short, and the Process suddenly makes sense. The only difference is that today it would be stored on an encrypted thumb drive—and there would always be a backup copy.

Joe Ross is a true naïf. Although he knows the Process is valuable, he has zero awareness of the stealthy predators circling him and his invention. They close in during a Caribbean retreat organized by Mr. Klein to celebrate the company's impending success. As Joe meets one dubious character after another, you know he's being played, but you don't know how. The obvious villain—obvious because Carter Burwell's score gives him a suitably ominous introduction—is one Jimmy Dell, played by Steve Martin, whom Mamet deliberately cast against type. It turns out that Martin does sinister even better than he does funny. Jimmy presents himself as a wealthy connoisseur of rare cars, fine dining and Swiss bank accounts, and oh yeah, he has an attractive sister in New York who would love to meet Joe. Then again, Joe has been romantically distracted by a junior employee, Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon), who takes the opportunity of the island holiday to pursue her long-simmering crush on the bookish mathematician. Susan eventually becomes Joe's haven in New York, when things get complicated and Joe's usual backstop at the company, attorney George Lang (Ricky Jay), is conveniently unavailable with a case of the flu.

Several familiar faces circulate through The Spanish Prisoner, including FBI agents played by Ed O'Neill and Felicity Huffman (not yet famous for Desperate Housewives or infamous for a college admissions scandal). But with Steve Martin playing a bad guy, the audience doesn't know who can be trusted any more than Joe does. By the end of the film, we're spun around as wildly as Joe, with Mamet's pace ratcheting up from its deliberate and stately beginning to a dizzying finale where one revelation follows another like blows to a punch-drunk fighter. Some of them you might see coming. But some you won't.

The Spanish Prisoner Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Spanish Prisoner Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc's only extra is the film's trailer (1.33:1; 480i; 2:19). Sony's earlier DVD was similarly bare.

The Spanish Prisoner Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.