House of Games (The Criterion Collection)
by David Mamet
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Actor: J.T. Walsh, Joe Mantegna, Lilia Skala, Lindsay Crouse, Mike NussbaumDirector: David Mamet
Brand: Image Entertainment
Writer: David Mamet
Producer: Michael Hausman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), PCM Mono; English (Original Language), PCM Mono
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 102 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-08-21
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion
DVD Reviews of House of Games (The Criterion Collection)
DVD Review: 'The necessity of dark places to transact a dark business'
Summary: 5 Stars
Mamet is hard-boiled,a subtle user of language games,to enact transactions.He takes individuals from 2 tribes,one from psychiatry and one from the the world of shysters and con-men and he sets them circling each other.Uniquely for himself he adds, untypically,a female psychotherapist.You get the feeling he thinks psychotherapy is"all just a con game.It's all talk...you do nothing"(says Billy,the victim of a debt who seeks her help).That is the challenge he sets up to induct her and us into a world of vicarious pleasure,a life of crime that is a series of ingenious games,until the realisation that he/she was the victim of a master game that reached back to the beginning of the film.Small cons lead onto a bigger con,cons operate within cons,language is like the guage with its pauses and repetitions and cadences,polished from Mamet's theatrical world,featuring players he brings with him as a company and family(including ex-wife Lindsay Cruise),who are all tried and tested deliverers of Mamet's crafted dialogue. Within a situation that is carefully prepared,where the environment,the `script'and the required behaviour are very familiar to the players, something is undertaken involving risk and challenge,the unexpected and the unpredictable,so the person(heroine,audience)for whose benefit it is all being staged will be tempted to participate,will be drawn in.
That House of Games,Mamet's 1st film,works in film terms,smoothly dovetailing theatrical-rhetorical and cinematic-minimal.This is a psychological drama as well as a scam:human curiousity,greed and vanity are the counters in a game in which control is achieved through fantasy.Margaret Ford has written a best-selling book,Driven,a study of compulsive behaviour,she is a successful practitioner,she has a mentor to whom she confesses what she does is a `con game',she can't help people,she makes a Freudian slip about her father telling a murderess(she's seeing in prison)she's a whore.Her mentor tells her to relax,enjoy herself.She says she enjoys writing her book.She keeps a notebook:'"Help me-no one will help me."`The character Mike,the unbeatable gambler-seen as omniscient,who doles out punishment.'Turning a page:`The House of Games 211 Beaumont Street'
`The necessity to find a place to be humiliated-a place you can go back to again and again.He romanticises the scene...soft lighting...'This may all be part of a novel she is writing.
We cut to a night scene in the House of Games.Mike(Mantegna) is the charismatic hustler and practitioner of the card-sharping House of Games.She has come to ask him to stop threatening Billy and finds the debt is $800 not $25,000.She can cancel the debt if she does Mike a `favour'.He informs her what a `tell' is,then proceeds via a poker game to draw her into his world.She is conned into thinking she has seen through their con to get her $6000.They say "It's only business,it's the American way".This becomes the guarded,deadpan mode in which their courtship is played out-a double seduction in which Mike offers the kind of danger and excitement Margeret has only known at second-hand through her work,and by his demonstration of the psychological clues and ploys in gamesmanship which pique her as a professional in the field.
Mike tells her "to trust no one".She asks him if he'd engage with her in a study of the confidence game.He says "you want to see how a true bad man plies his trade?"He describes why it's a confidence game,"because you give me your confidence?No,because I give you mine."He demonstrates how to get money when you have none:he gives William H.Macey his" confidence,I ask him for help,what he gets is he feels he's a good man."He thinks she gets something from this transaction:she "wants somebody to come along and possess her.To take you into a new thing."The con artist maintains control,until the repressed,morbidly fascinated doctor flips out,asserting
control in the only way available to a woman scorned.Or does she?The last piece of Mamet's puzzle might be the possibility that this all takes place in the heroine's mind,while she plays doctor to herself.Remember the notebook,before she goes to the House of Games,the Freudian slips,is Mike the father she has killed?Is her mentor her doctor?As for empathy...
Description of House of Games (The Criterion Collection)
Pulitzer Prize?winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet first sat in the director?s chair for this sly, merciless thriller, one of the most original and acclaimed films of the eighties. Mamet?s witty tale of a therapist and best-selling author (Lindsay Crouse) who must confront her own obsessions when she meets an attractive cardsharp (Joe Mantegna) is as psychologically acute as it is full of twists and turns, a rich character study told with the cold calculation of a career criminal.Bestsellers in DVD
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