While finding Mamet's knack for dialogue admirable, critic Rogoff complains that Mamet's play apes crime films from the 1940s and 1950s without the benefit of those dramas' clever story lines. Rogoff acknowledges that Mamet achieves his dramatic goals although those goals are too modest for the critic's tastes.

David Mamet is apparently listening to America's lower class. The news he brings back in his new play, American Buffalo (at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway), is that Americans living on the dark underside of small business and petty crockery speak of macho frustrations almost entirely in four-letter words. If the news doesn't seem new or persuasive, that may be because we have heard more antiseptic versions of it on big and little screens, where with a little soap in their mouths--American Buffalo's (no of charmless deadbeats would be more at home.

Robert Duvall' s Walter Cole...