The Spanish Prisoner

A study of David Mamet’s most successful independent film, The Spanish Prisoner (Sony Pictures Classics, 1997)

Despite more than a passing nod to such crowdpleasing classics as Hitchcock''s North by Northwest, playwright-turned-independent filmmaker David Mamet''s The Spanish Prisoner is a particularly idiosyncratic film that betrays its origin outside the Hollywood mainstream. Featuring a convoluted narrative, an excessive, often anti-classical, visual style, and belonging to the generic category of the''con game film'' which often challenges the spectator''s cognitive skills, The Spanish Prisoner is a film that bridges genre filmmaking withpersonal visual style, independent film production with niche distribution,and mainstream subject matter with unconventional filmic techniques.This book discusses The Spanish Prisoner as an example of contemporary American independent cinema while also using the film as a vehicle to explore several key ideas in film studies, especially in terms of aesthetics, narrative, style, spectatorship, genre and industry.