Political thrillers come in two kinds. (To speak only of well-made ones: the others don't signify.) In the first kind, the intrigues are clear in every detail. In the second, the intrigues are in the main just as clear, but some of the details are too compacted and brisk to be understood; the viewer is aware only that heavy doings are in progress. The odd, amusing aspect of the difference between the two kinds is that it doesn't matter much. If the thriller is well made, the difference is fairly unimportant. The first kind is of course preferable, but the hurtle, the very shape and pace of the second kind, can carry it off. It is the genre itself, if competently handled, that holds us.

A new play by David Mamet has just opened in London, a piece that (I've read) is written in an elegant Wildean style. Mamet's first play has just been filmed, and it is not in a Wildean style. Lakeboat written in 1970, takes place on a Great Lakes freighter sailing out of Chicago, and its language fits its crew. The young Mamet evidently had first-hand experience of such a ship and wanted to render a naturalistic account of the crew members' lives in the vein of the seagoing O'Neill, with the difference that the language is saltier, though the water is fresh.

It was a good idea to film this play; it was a bad idea to have Joe Mantegna direct it. Mantegna is an experienced Mamet actor, highly effective within a narrow range, but here he shows not the slightest directorial gift. The disaster begins before the film starts: Mamet puts a sophisticated French song, “La Mer,” under the opening credits, tonally quite wrong and only tenuously related to the film's subject. Every scene, whether inside the ship or on deck, is blatantly a scene, played through with consciousness of its scene-shape, its beginning and end. The lighting of the interiors is contrived and arty, always out of kilter with the ship's steely body. The naturalism of the play, the insistent flow of its gritty reality, is sandbagged at every turn.

The actors don't help. David Mamet's brother Tony Mamet plays the central character, a young man on his first voyage, which is also a rite of passage; he is unimpressive. Most of the others have previously proved competent, but here they all seem to be speaking their lines as if they have been paid to do so, are fulfilling their obligations, and will then move on to the next job. Mantegna himself has a keen vernacular ear as an actor; but he hasn't used it as a director. Besides, he has cast Charles Durning and George Wendt as the captain and first mate, and—without prejudice against obese people—it is curious to behold these two, a total of about five hundred pounds of belly, running a ship.

Still, I can't help being glad that this film was made. It reminds us of the phenomenon that Mamet is, from this early O'Neill vein through the poignant fantasy of The Water Engine, in its three verbal modes, through American Buffalo, which penetrates vernacular so deeply that it converts it into a quasi-poetic language, to Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that is German expressionism seen through postmodern eyes. Georg Kaiser in Chicago. This brief account omits many of Mamet's plays, but I mention a few of his screenplays: his bitter-wry adaptation of The Verdict; his own evocative House of Games, which he also directed; his adaptation and direction of Terence Rattigan's ultra-English The Winslow Boy. So Lakeboat is an obliquely gratifying experience: it lets us see, even through this clumsy picture, how good Mamet was at the start and how, in very many ways, he has grown.