37. The Spanish Prisoner

Boy Scouts get a rough ride in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (No. 9 on my personal list of favorite overlooked films of the 90s – Pi being my top choice), a tour-de-dark-force grifter drama that's as subtle as it is smart. Never technically overwhelming, but brazenly involving as it layers and details a rich story of how an intelligent, semi-sweet business type gets roped into an ever-spiraling con game, this is the definitive type of rhythmic drama (film or play) in which Pulitzer Prize-winning director-writer Mamet so excels.

Prisoner sports a spartanly refreshing script chock full of tidy and often overlapping dialogue. It's deliciously handled by its ensemble cast, particularly Campbell Scott as the bemused corporate executive who is taken for one heck of a conniving, and later deadly, journey of industrial espionage. Steve Martin plays marvelously against his wild and crazy type, with Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon displaying one of the many understated, well-spoken roles that populate the film. Humility and extraordinary -- and unfortunately misplaced -- trust are horsewhipped about the screen, directed with a determined steadfast urgency and intimacy.

All this is mounted behind well-placed smoke and mirrors, and shrouded within a terrifically effective score by Carter Burwell. For those of you who haven't caught The Spanish Prisoner, be warned: there's a potential con artist on every corner -- the grifter's rapturous equivalent of any expanding metropolitan Starbucks franchise. Scott's all-too-noble character laments at one deceptively gullible moment, "They played me for such a fool…such a fool," Yes, indeed, and there's a devious, appreciative smile waiting for every viewer and viewing of this small treasure. Dog, my cat, indeed. (Elias Savada)