Film Forum

U.S., 1992
Directed by James Foley
Starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin
Screenplay and Story by David Mamet
WINNER Venice Film Festival – Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), 1992
Approx. 100 min. 35mm.

“The title of David Mamet’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross, refers to two of the real estate developments that salesmen in the drama have been pushing on investors: Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. The names evoke verdancy and wealth, a precious swath of finite land — ‘they’re not making it any more’, to quote Mark Twain — and the salesmen have the glossy brochures to prove it. But it’s a swindle peddled by swindlers who themselves are being swindled. What they’re selling has no value and they have no value if they’re not selling. In the brilliant film adaptation, still electric 30 years later, a motivational speaker lays it out for them: ‘Only one thing counts in this life: get them to sign on the line that is dotted.’ GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is about many things — masculinity, morality, capitalism — but it’s fundamentally an ‘honor among thieves’ story, following anguished men as they struggle to hang on to their integrity while acting as low-level rip-off artists.” – The Guardian

Presented with support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“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.”
– Roger Ebert

“A searing indictment of all sorts of American dreams, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is a welcome if foul-mouthed reminder of just what it takes for a lot of folk to make it through the working day.”
– Empire