Glengarry Glen Ross

Must Watch Movies

Director James Foley

Writer David Mamet

Al Pacino

Jack Lemmon

Alec Baldwin

Alan Arkin

Ed Harris

Kevin Spacey

Jonathan Pryce

What a cast. Normally, you’d only see a plum cast like this pulled in to prop up an Agatha Christie, a Towering Actioner.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/mediaviewer/rm2774475777/?ref_=tt_ov_i

Glengarry Glen Ross was a play written by man-mountain David Mamet at the top of his game and later adapted into a movie. And with that pedigree, in 1991~, there really cannot have been a much bigger cast than the one director James Foley ended up with.

I can only imagine the free for all, the bunfight going on in agent offices all across town when news of this screenplay dropped. The tears, the threats, oh, the melodrama. There must’ve been some biggg names willing to do just about anything, pull their own teeth out with a rusty pair of pliers, just for the chance to get in on this one.

Why? Because it's an actors dream. Big, fat, jam-filled doughnuts of pithy, perfectly balanced, nuanced, raw - yet eloquent – chunks, reams of text which could not help but show off any actor’s chops – whether they be good or not, they’d understand one like this only came by once in a decade.

There are very few writers, Very few, who can just deliver in a way actors take to like coming Home, but Mamet is one. God, these speeches must’ve monopolised actors audition monologues for years after.

And to give him his due, Foley didn’t drop the baby either in the way he shot it, perhaps in full knowledge that all he really needed to do was give the lens, the space to this choice cast. He does also deliver a little egg for the cognoscenti though, a nod to one of the greats, by reframing painter Edward Hoppers ‘Nighthawks’.

Baldwin has never been better, he was born for this role, this speech. And you can say the same for Pacino, for Lemmon for Spacey for Pryce. I have to say though my absolute admiration is for Alan Arkin.

Like Om Puri, William Sanderson, Vincent D’Onofrio, Harry Dean Stanton or Jimmy Cagney, Arkin is a character actor’s character actor.

Vincent D’ Onofrio Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119654/mediaviewer/rm573819904/

Bigger roles - indeed the very fabric of any movie, the story itself, so often falls upon the satellite cast delivering in spades and this gem is a scintillating example of how that’s done. Each turn glistening in turn.

The smooth, expert narrative dropping you in unprepared, super-deep, super-early. You simply don’t come up for air as the finely wrought plot pulls you down deeper still, down pressure-cooker deep, where there’s suddenly no oxygen and distant light struggles to reach. A swirling, murky domain of bottom-feeders, dirt and death, where it beats you solid with a blunt instrument.

Enjoy the a shower after.

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