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.

While on a retreat on the island of St. Estèphe, he meets wealthy stranger Julian "Jimmy" Dell and attracts the interest of one of the company's new secretaries, Susan Ricci.

The Swiss bank account that Jimmy opened for him makes it look as though he is hiding assets, and the certificate he signed to join the club turns out to be a request for political asylum in Venezuela, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

David Mamet is famous for the style of dialogue he writes, which is characterized by incomplete sentences, foul language, stutters, restarts, and interruptions; it is known as "Mamet-speak".

Often they punctuate their dialogue with four-letter words, but in The Spanish Prisoner there is not a single obscenity, and we picture Mamet with a proud grin on his face, collecting his very first PG rating".

By disdaining to look and sound like anything overly serious, Mr. Mamet's Pinteresque speech rhythms succeed as nothing since Glengarry Glen Ross (1984 on stage, 1992 on screen) in capturing something pervasively paranoid in contemporary life.

[8] James Berardinelli of Reelviews.net, who gave it 3 out of 4 stars, compared it to Hitchcock's works, claiming that it "supplies us with a seemingly-endless series of twists and turns, only a fraction of which are predictable" as well as praising the actors by saying that "nearly every major performance is impeccable".

[11] Chris Grunden of Film Journal International compared the film to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and The Man Who Knew Too Much: "Somewhere Alfred Hitchcock is smiling, for The Spanish Prisoner is the most deliciously labyrinthine homage to the master of suspense in recent years... Campbell Scott elicits just the right amount of youthful vanity, which gradually crumbles as he gets increasingly entrapped in the scheme to play him for a fool.

The strong supporting cast features fine work... Barbara Tulliver's editing is crisp—the pacing never flags for a moment—and Carter Burwell's score is fabulously moody and evocative".

[12] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rating of 89% from 61 reviews with the consensus: "The Spanish Prisoner delivers just what fans of writer-director David Mamet expect: a smart, solidly constructed drama that keeps viewers guessing... and entertained along the way.