The Spanish Prisoner
| The Spanish Prisoner | |
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| Directed by | David Mamet |
| Produced by | Jean Doumanian |
| Written by | David Mamet |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Carter Burwell |
| Edited by | Barbara Tulliver |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
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Release date
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Running time
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110 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10 million |
| Box office | $9,584,314 |
The Spanish Prisoner is a 1997 American neo-noir suspense film, written and directed by David Mamet and starring Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman and Ricky Jay. The film is premised around a story of corporate espionage conducted through an elaborate confidence game. In spite of the film's title, the actual plot includes only superficial similarties to the Spanish Prisoner scam.
In 1999 the film was nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for the Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay but lost out to Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight.
Corporate engineer Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) has invented a very lucrative, very secret industrial process. While on a corporate retreat at the resort island of St. Estèphe, he meets a wealthy stranger, Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), and attracts the interest of one of the company's new secretaries, Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon).
Jimmy wants to introduce Joe socially to his sister, an Olympic-class tennis player, in New York and asks him to deliver a package to her. Susan, who sits near Joe on the airplane back to New York, converses with him about how "you never know who anybody is," talks about unwitting drug mules, and repeats, "Who in this world is what they seem to be? Who?" Realizing that he doesn't really know Jimmy, and afraid the package might contain something illegal, Joe opens it on the plane, finding only a book on tennis (the 1939 edition of "Budge on Tennis"); in the process he accidentally rips the cover. Once home, Joe buys another copy of the book, to give to Jimmy's sister, and keeps the torn one at his office.
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Wikipedia