David Mamet’s two-act play, Glen­gar­ry Glen Ross, was first staged in 1983, and won the Pulitzer Prize, remain­ing some­thing of a clas­sic of con­tem­po­rary the­atre. It was adapt­ed for film in 1992, by Mamet him­self, and it is almost a word-for-word tran­scrip­tion of the play, with the one excep­tion being this: the most famous, most quot­ed, and most pop­u­lar scene of the movie, which is the sub­ject of this blog, didn’t exist in the play but was writ­ten appar­ent­ly to bulk out the piece to film length.

In cre­at­ing the scene, Mamet arguably sets the tone for the entire movie. The movie fea­tures the pres­sured lives of real estate sales­men played by Jack Lem­mon, Ed Har­ris and Alan Arkin, strug­gling to close deals in this tough­est of tough rack­ets, and about to receive a vis­it from Blake (Alec Bald­win), the moti­va­tion­al speak­er from Hell, who has been sent from “down­town” to read the riot act. It’s excru­ci­at­ing stuff; it takes a while to dawn on the sales­men just how tough this grilling is going to be (“Put that cof­fee down. Coffee’s for closers only…”) and we gri­mace at the rit­u­al dis­em­bow­elling of the poor men (“You call your­self a sales­man, you son of a bitch?”).

Edi­fy­ing it ain’t, but nonethe­less it’s an act­ing mas­ter­class from all con­cerned: Bald­win dish­ing out the flak; Lem­mon like a rab­bit in the head­lights; Har­ris ini­tial­ly deri­sive and scep­ti­cal but then brow-beat­en and forced to endure the spiel; Arkin sub­mis­sive, silent. We can see and hear from the win­dows that out­side is dark and the rain tor­ren­tial; inside, the office is shab­by and bleak and Blake is an unre­lent­ing and piti­less tor­men­tor. Now imag­ine you’ve just been told that you’re fight­ing to save your job in this month’s sales con­test, in which first prize is a Cadil­lac Eldo­ra­do, sec­ond prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is “You’re fired”. It’s stark, to say the least. You wouldn’t want to be in this game…

But hey, you’re not in this game — so sit back, relax, and enjoy not being on the receiv­ing end of this ver­bal mac­er­a­tion and instead observe the equal mea­sures of brava­do and human frailty exhib­it­ed in this won­der­ful­ly uncom­fort­able per­for­mance by some great Amer­i­can actors.