David Mamet deserves some respect over this picture who had intend to do for years and using a cheap casting made a reasonable work...of course the frame is predicable but the movie is intense since the beginning...have some weak points like when Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) released that was deceived by the gang and hear all conversation behind the shutter, apart from that the movie is very interesting and make a mind study...Joe Mantegna has a remarkable acting as the Crook...he made another famous movie with Mamet "Things Changes"....without forget the great past actress Lilia Skala who has a nice role in this picture and William H. Macy one's first appearances!!! Resume: First watch: 1992 / How many: 4 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 8

No use pretending there aren't some great lines in this Mamet masterpiece. There are holes in the story, sure, and I'll get to those later. But for those of you wondering how you transfer a work of literature from the stage to the film set, this makes for a wonderful study. You may have noticed how some techniques do not transfer from the stage to film set easily, if at all, but that's partly what makes this film so fascinating. It's a play on roles and their traps and freedoms.Margaret Ford is an intriguing character; educated to the point of embodying a robotic decorum, her faintly masculine persona as an educator is absorbing to watch. Her success as a psychologist and an author should bring her a sense of inner peace and satisfaction, but there is something missing from the equation.The fact is that Margaret is intelligent enough to know that she is not really helping people, only playing a role of elevated status in the social order. A role she has worked hard and studied hard to win. But now that she is secured in her success she has doubts about its true validity. She possesses advanced knowledge of a type, but have her educational activities drawn out the best in her or simply made her another cookie cutter personality? Margaret wants to help and it is this desire to truly help that gets her involved in some really rugged business.Enter Mike into the frame. Mike is also an intriguing character; soft-spoken and suave, glib almost to the point of being feminine, he also comes across as a personality conforming to a type of role, that of the shifty con man. He is playing the tough guy, but he's far too articulate to carry that off convincingly.So what's really going on here? What you have in 'House of Games' to my way of thinking, are males playing at being men and a lone female playing at being a female according to definitions that in the end prove as unworkable and unsatisfying as some of Margaret's psychology sessions with her patients. That these roles do the exact opposite of what they are intended to do, i.e., ultimately feminize the male in spite of all his macho posturing and masculinize the female despite her avowed assertion to want to help through expressions of her own compassion is what makes this so thought provoking a piece.Margaret realizes near the end of act one in this film that her intelligence and shrewd observational skills have just barely saved her from being conned out of a substantial portion of her money. At this point, she has demonstrated both Moral and Intellectual authority over these would be predatory Con Men. This is surely enough to warrant a chapter in her next upcoming book.But what does she do? She returns to have another dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight.Why? This is the interesting part and where the hole in the plot leaks like a squirt gun filled with water. Why does she do it? Why does Margaret return to consort with Con Men who have already tried to make her a mark and who undoubtedly will try again should she have any further dealings with them? What is it about her academic environment that is so arid and vacuous that she must at length seek out a criminal for a date? That this is in the end a date movie with a deadly twist is not be denied. It appears to me there should have been a male character or characters in Margaret's academic setting with whom she tries to relate but fails to do so. This would have lent greater credence to her rendezvous with Mike.Yes, Margaret comes back and bares her breast to all the misogynistic intentions and elaborated schemes of this den of thieves she has stumbled upon in her quest to truly help a human being in need.Why does she do it? To feel more like a woman? At the end, she attempts to exact her revenge on Mike using his methods which, it turns out he understands better than she does as he has been applying them most of his adult life.All I can say is I would have rather seen her wearing a wire and regaining both the Moral and Intellectual high ground she demonstrated at the beginning of the film to bookend it here.I think this would have been more interesting than seeing her become both a murderer and a thief. She could have watched Mike being taken away in handcuffs while she fought hard to stifle her tears at the loss of this love of her life. Somewhat like the last scene in 'The Maltese Falcon', only this time with the woman contemplating the stuff that dreams are made of...

Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) is a psychiatrist and a best selling writer. Her patient Billy Hahn is suicidal from his $25k gambling debts. She decides to help him by confronting his bookie Mike (Joe Mantegna). It turns out Billy only owes $800 and Mike is willing to forgive it if she does him a favor.Director David Mamet has written a tight tensed thriller about cons and con-men. I have to admit that it was eye opening with the various cons when I first saw this. It's aged a little since then or maybe I've aged. The cons are no longer eye opening, but you can see them coming a mile away. Although, they're like old friends that you want to visit once in awhile.The writing is still tightly wound. Lindsay Crouse has that cool demeanor. Sometimes still waters run deep, and her character has a dark side. Joe Mantegna has that dark scheming character down. For a first time directing effort, this was quite spectacular. His simplistic vision allows the actors to fill the screen. Luckily he had some great ones working here.

*** This review may contain spoilers about (Double Indemnity – 1944) too ***Remember (Double Indemnity – 1944)? It's where the urban man discovered that he could be easily deceived by his dearest ones. Since that date, many urban men and women, in other movies, lived the same trick again and again. Yet, as times goes by, some of them learned the lesson, out of watching too many movies I think!, then developed an armor, and – why not – got to deceive the deceiver too. (House of Games) presents the phase where the played-with becomes a player, but does this movie play it right ?! This was originally intended to be a larger-budget movie with many "name" actors, but writer / director (David Mamet) chose to cast his wife (Lindsay Crouse) and friend (Joe Mantegna). Not necessarily a good decision! I didn't like the performance of (Crouse) as the heroine. Yes, the character is for an outwardly cold woman who suppresses her reactions, but that doesn't mean that the actress must be cold and suppress her reactions! I watched (Joe Mantegna) as an impostor before; a mild – if not idiot – one in some movies, and a bloody violent one in other. This time he didn't bring something else his known goods. Let alone that his charisma didn't help him being a lead, so he couldn't provide the masculine charm to convince us that he's that lover-in-predicament (especially after the murder's plot). Yet, still the worst of the movie is its climax.We have a con-is-born situation. Although that female psychiatrist, Margaret, looks initially innocent, but she has some impostor hidden inside of her, supposedly long time age. OK. But I believe that that character had to be beaten by the experience's intelligence of the first, and senior, impostor; Mike. Since the beginning we follow the interlock of the psychiatrist / the scientific experience, with the conman / the practical experience. If both of them are natural born impostors, one of them obviously has a primitive practical expertise, and I do mean Margaret. That's why I see that the gun, which she takes from Mike's partner and shots Mike himself with at the climax, isn't a real gun in the first place, or it is one that has false bullets (like the one which the fake cop, played by J.T. Walsh, was holding). Because Mike's death – in my viewpoint – had to be pure acting since that psychiatrist who declared finally her truth as a criminal, imposter, and killer doesn't hold a candle to those experienced conmen who practiced the profession longer than what she did.It's close to Double Indemnity's plot. At that 1940s movie there was a man who became a victim of a woman and her partner to kill someone so they may win something. Here, a woman became a victim of a man and his partner to kill someone – falsely – so they may win something. The difference this round is that the victim is smarter. She got to payback, kill the planners themselves and win everything. It's clear that (Mamet) wants to prove that the evil guy is inside of us, and if gets free will practice his games successfully on others, and if has science will be the cleverest player of them all. But I believe that the older criminal – even if lost the scientific systematization or the methodical mentality – is more capable of hoaxing that who's still a student in crime school. That master's experience must defeat the inexperienced (like the green sailor) or the new beginners (like the heroine herself) whether the degrees of evil inside of both, the master and the others, were equaled or not. Because – simply – no one wins but the lucky, and no one "always" wins but the clever player.It's as unpersuasive as going into a gang of pro pickpockets, while being no pickpocket, and pulling off stealing all of them ! Well, it's a Hollywood dream then. Therefore if – for instance – the last scene, of the restaurant, was kind of a late flashback; that flawed climax could have been more persuasive and realistic. Whatever the addition might be, the movie needed to root well that that psychiatrist was an old con indeed; she merely didn't have a big chance before, and the ones who played her didn't know that about her earlier. Overall, I liked how (Mamet) studied so many stings, scams and con jobs, tightened the matter of obsession from start to finish, and mastered making so sedate crime movie. However, I didn't think that the shocking climax is logical or solidly built. It's something to shock anyway, and hit the viewer with the movie's main moral about the devil in us. Hence, it serves finely as a revenge for all the inexperienced and – mostly – the previously hoaxed out there. To tell them that "you can deceive too, and – of all people – the ones who deceived you before, and without having any previous experience too". So it feels eventually as a perfect Revenge of The Nerds, not Revenge of The ones who-just-look-outwardly Nerds !