A real Boy Scout

The Spanish Prisoner

(1997)

I can't tell you why this film breaks my heart, 'cause if you haven't seen it you should, and you should be able to have your heart broken into little pieces and puréed in the Cuisinart, too, but let me just say that the first time I saw it, it was one of the great heartbreaking experiences of my cinemaphiliac career, and even now, knowing from the start, I am pained by it.

Mamet's Hitchcock film, and the master himself did better maybe two or three times. The brilliant MacGuffin is an unspecified "process" that Joe Ross (Campbell Scott, in maybe the fourth or fifth film I'd seen him in, but the first time I really connected with him) has invented for a company that does something equally unspecified. But whatever, it's very, very important--worth scads of money, hyperintricate machinations, lives. If Hitch had made it, he would have cast James Stewart in a role not unlike Stewart's in the preobsession half of Vertigo: a simple, honest, intelligent-but-streetdumb patsy for the puppetmasters, particularly his boss (Ben Gazzara) and the mysterious Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin, in perhaps his best film performance ever). And the conclusion is every bit as satisfyingly implausible as Hitchcock would have given us.

Bonus this time: wondering "Who is that familiar face playing FBI agent McCune?" then following the end credits to see that it was Felicity Huffman, then 34, looking nothing like a man, and, when the film hit the festival circuit in September 1997, just married to Bill Macy, already a Mamet mainstay.