SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Trickery and Tradition.” New Republic 218, no. 17 (27 April 1998): 26-7.

In the following review, Kauffmann comments on the role of trickery and deceit in The Spanish Prisoner, and bemoans the film's transformation from business drama to crime thriller.

Deception is a key theme in David Mamet. House of Games, for instance, moves through a series of seeming truths to revelations that expose those truths as mere tricks. Life, Mamet frequently reminds us, may possibly not be worse than it seems, but certainly is different from what we think it at first.

In the new film that Mamet has written and directed, The Spanish Prisoner deception is enlarged. It is not only the theme of the story, it engrosses the very form of the film. It begins as a tense, high-voltage business drama couched in secrecies. An inventor, Joe Ross, who works for a large New York company...