[In the following review, Kauffmann criticizes the casting choices for the film version of American Buffalo, but provides a positive assessment of the work overall.]

Obviously the one-set play with very few characters is not suitable for filming—except that, like so many obvious wisdoms, it's untrue. Precepts bend to talent. Stevie and The Caretaker and My Dinner with André, all made from small-scale theater works, are valuable films. American Buffalo is another.

David Mamet made the screen adaptation of his play and has done only a little physical “opening up”: most of the film takes place where the play does, in Don's Resale Shop, a junk shop crammed with all kinds of odds and ends. One of the play's fascinations is that it seems to put that shop under a microscope. A minuscule speck of the world is hugely enlarged, like the eye of a fly in magnifying photography; so, paradoxically, the shop becomes massive in veristic detail at the same time that it becomes an abstraction. In the film the paradox is heightened with a simple device. The streets outside are always empty, whether we glimpse them through the windows or occasionally go out there. Once in a long while, a car drives by. Not one other person is seen, other than a few partially glimpsed faces in a poker game right at the start. Thus this intensely realistic shop is simultaneously anywhere and nowhere.

It's in a dingy part of whatever city it is. Opposite Don's is a vacant movie theater, for rent. Diagonally across the way is the coffee shop that figures in the dialogue, but the doorway is not exactly busy. Sometimes it rains, heavily, and, as heavy rain will do, this increases the sense of enclosure.

Mamet's language in itself underscores the paradox of verism-cum-abstraction. The general texture is naturalistic, nearly stenographic—the broken sentences, the repetitions, the litanies of everyday; then, suddenly, with a word or a phrase, the vernacular lifts into an arch. “This is admirable.” “You know, this is real classical money we're talking about.” “The shot is yours, no one's disputing that.” “The path of some crazed lunatic sees you as an invasion of his personal domain.” With a lesser writer, such lines might seem fissures in verism; but Mamet so thoroughly certifies the accuracy of his ear that we feel we are flying past the character's actual powers of expression into the thoughts in him that he isn't always able to express. Like the physical context, the real is lifted into the abstract.

Two men are the center of the piece, Don, who owns the shop, and Teach, of no known occupation except burglaries now and then. They gab and fret and discuss and pass the time until, almost obliquely, a plan for a burglary is broached by Don. There's a third character, a young gofer called Bob, a sort of apprentice to Don, who is also involved in the burglary plan. The title refers to an American buffalo nickel that a customer bought in Don's shop a week or so earlier.

Don suspects, though he's not sure, that the coin is worth more than he got for it and that the customer has other rarities. Don decides to rob the customer's house, and it's around this scheme that the play simmers and boils. The scheme is inchoate—very loose indeed if these are experienced burglars—but the play's emphasis is not on the burglary itself, it's on the dialogue around it, the verbal volleyball that the two principals keep playing. In Beckett's Endgame Clov asks, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm replies, “The dialogue.” Beckett's pair are inside an empty sphere scraping its top; Mamet's pair are also inside, scraping the bottom. Both pairs live and breathe through interchange.

American Buffalo is full of opportunities for the eager symbolic interpreter. The junk shop as the detritus of an errant, wasteful society, Teach (which is only his nickname) as an instructor who can't instruct; and (bingo!) the quest for the coin whose true value isn't known, plus the fumbling of that quest—all this is fodder for symbolists. For me, however, the play is a species of incantation, profane and desperate, by vacuous men trying to create through their “dialogue” some sense of being, some environment for that being.

The producer of this film was Gregory Mosher, long experienced in the theater, who directed the world premiere of American Buffalo in Chicago in 1975. The director was Michael Corrente, who has written and directed one previous film, Federal Hill, unseen by me. Corrente was trained for the theater and has worked there, including a production of American Buffalo. Presumably aided by Mosher and certainly aided by the editor, Kate Sanford, he keeps the film moving without jostling it. Corrente never seems worried about the one-room venue, and his freedom is even clearer in those few scenes where we go outside—they never seem frantic attempts to escape four walls. The film just takes place, naturally and energetically, where it takes place.

About the performances themselves, some question. Dustin Hoffman is Teach, long-haired and scruffy, loping around like a man who has nowhere to go and is, from moment to moment, inventing a dynamic for his life. Hoffman was implicitly up against tough competition in this part. Some of us have seen Robert Duvall and Al Pacino as Teach, and each was, in his own temper, superb. Hoffman, ultimately, is not. He has all the technique, the vigor of address, the experienced actor's ravening of actor's chances, but sometimes these attributes become apparent. A gesture is too clearly enjoyed, an intonation slips upward from this mucky world; and we become aware of Hoffman, the star, slumming. Remembering his Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy twenty-seven years ago, in some measure an antecedent of Teach, I hoped to see Ratso much more full and complex. But in those twenty-seven years Hoffman has become so stellar that he can't keep every wisp of his success out of this performance.

Don is played by Dennis Franz, known for his running role in NYPD Blue. Here his performance exemplifies the freeze that TV acting can inflict. I've seen that TV show a few times and have seen how Franz presents his bulky presence, his taciturnity, his knowingness week after week in episodes that are in part tailored to keep him turning out the Franz product. He keeps doing it here. Franz certainly has some substance but only to the degree that his predetermined persona allows. He renders the same brusque authority, and, as on TV, his expression scarcely alters throughout the picture. “This is what you bought,” he seems to say, “and this is what you'll get.”

Bob is done by a teenage black actor, Sean Nelson. He is completely competent, but Nelson adds another element to the mix. Bob has usually been played by someone in his early 20s. The use of Nelson in the part puts Don and Teach in the position of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Two further notes. When, toward the end, Teach trashes the shop, it's done much more violently than I've ever seen. This takes Don's passivity past the credible. And Thomas Newman's music is incomprehensibly harsh at the start and finish.

At any rate, American Buffalo is now available on film, in a lucid version. Whatever that version's flaws, Mamet's incantation works again.