The
Spanish Prisoner, directed and written by David Mamet,
is a film about a con. Similar to The Maltese Falcon (1931),
nearly everyone involved is greedy and will stop at nothing
to get their hands on something of extreme value. In The
Spanish Prisoner, the thing of value is a "process," developed
by a research scientist who works for a New York firm,
to control the world market in widgets. (We are not told
what they are.) Joseph A. Ross (played by Campbell Scott),
the developer of the process, expects more than a simple
Christmas bonus for his invention, but company CEO Mr.
Klein (played by Ben Gazzara) keeps putting him off. Ross
flies to St. Estéphe, a mythical Caribbean island
(actually Islamamorada, Florida) to tell Klein and others
in the company that his invention will bring the company
an estimated $300 million or so for about five years, that
is, until Japanese reverse engineer and duplicate. While
on the island, he meets Pat McCune (played by Felicity
Huffman), who has an FBI business card (obviously phony,
to those who have seen one), and Julian Dell (played by
Steve Martin), a wealthy New York executive. Ross's secretary
Susan Ricci (played by the director's spouse, Rebecca Pidgeon)
is also on the trip, buttering him up at every opportunity
so that, in her words, she will become the "queen" when
Ross is promoted to "king" of the company. When
he returns to New York, Dell makes friends with Ross, advising
him to get independent legal advice in order to ensure
that he will profit from the invention, so he arranges
for Ross to meet his lawyer. To paraphrase Dell, "Everyone
is business should be assumed to be a crook." The
film's tagline is "Can you really trust anyone?" Soon,
he calls the FBI woman, who warns him that Dell is a crook.
She outfits him with a wire, presumably so that the FBI
can trap him attempting to bribe or to threaten violence
in order to gain the process. A collaborating FBI agent
explains that Dell is pulling "the oldest con game
in the book," namely, The Spanish Prisoner. The Spanish
Prisoner con involves someone who explains to an innocent,
trusting fool that he escaped from a country without his
beautiful sister and the family fortune; if the fool will
fork over a large sum of money, he will be rewarded for
his investment by getting both the girl and the money,
though in reality the con man takes the money and disappears.
But now the so-called FBI agents are pulling the con, and
they cleverly switch the notebook containing the process
right under Ross's eyes. In due course, the con also involves
setting up "Boy Scout" Ross for a crime, even
implicating him in a murder. His secretary, Klein, and
the bogus FBI agents are in cahoots. How he is ultimately
exonerated, though without notes for the process, is the
reason to wait until the surprising end of the film. Corporate
greed, industrial espionage, and the powerful preying on
the naïve are the themes updated from The
Maltese Falcon in The Spanish Prisoner. MH
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