Thursday, May 5, 2011

Glengarry Glen Ross: award-winning play and movie about life in the shadows of the American dream

Glengarry Glen Ross is a 1992 independent dramatic film, adapted by David Mamet from his acclaimed 1984 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning play of the same name, says Wikipedia.

The film depicts two days in the lives of four real estate salesmen and how they become desperate when the corporate office sends a representative to "motivate" them by announcing that, in one week, all except the top two salesmen will be fired.

The film, like the play, is notorious for its use of profanity, leading the cast to jokingly refer to the film as "Death of a Fuckin' Salesman".[1] The actual title of the film comes from the names of two of the real estate developments being peddled by the salesmen characters (Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms).

The salesmen are supplied with names and phone numbers of leads (potential clients) and regularly use underhanded and dishonest tactics to make sales. Many of the leads rationed out by the office manager are impoverished individuals lacking either the money or the desire to actually invest in land.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone magazine, wrote, "The pleasure of this unique film comes in watching superb actors dine on Mamet's pungent language like the feast it is".[12] Roger Ebert's review in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Mamet's dialogue has a kind of logic, a cadence, that allows people to arrive in triumph at the ends of sentences we could not possibly have imagined. There is great energy in it. You can see the joy with which these actors get their teeth into these great lines, after living through movies in which flat dialogue serves only to advance the story".[13]

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