Glengarry Glen Ross

This foul-mouthed drama revolves around a phony real estate operation, Premiere Properties, which gets a royal shaking up in the very first scene from consulting supersalesman Blake (Alec Baldwin). Blake's motivation strategy is brutally simple--sell or get out--and his ultimatum sets up a mad scramble in the office. Veteran supersalesman Shelley "The Machine" Levine (Jack Lemmon) trained the office's current sales leader, Ricky Roma (Al Pacino). But Levine is now a desperate man, his selling skills thwarted by stale leads and his situation complicated by a hospitalized daughter. His frustrated colleague Moss (Ed Harris) draws fellow salesman Aaronow (Alan Arkin) into a plot to burgle the office, steal the leads and sell them to a rival company. Aaronow isn't too thrilled, but there's another conspirator who is already set up to take the fall for the burglary. What drama there is hinges on whether the third party is Levine or Roma, himself driven to desperation when his "locked-in" deal with a henpecked prospect (Jonathan Pryce) unravels.

Whereas most films would focus on the details of the theft itself, Mamet's screenplay doesn't reveal exactly what happened, and it's clear that he's not particularly interested. Instead, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS focuses on the dilemmas of the various salesmen as they sustain themselves by reliving past glories in the desiccated present. Lemmon is superb here in the type of role he's justly renowned for, a downtrodden individual who, in previous incarnations, has always found some form of salvation through self-knowledge. (In this instance, that solution is not forthcoming.) Pacino starts cocky and confident as Roma, only to shrink before our eyes as his miserable "prospect" flees to report him to the authorities. Arkin is wonderfully cagy and Harris brings real acid to his role as the most coldly cynical of the group. Director James Foley turns the screenplay's staginess into an asset, creating a claustrophobic vision of hell as a place where we're all fighting for survival, clutching a sweat-stained, dog-eared pile of bad leads.