Movie Report: Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

I got this DVD for a buck in Arkansas last month, and it was the first film I watched when I got back.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I reported on the printed play in 2007 (or as I like to say, a couple months ago–my goodness, that would be right after I left my job as the Director of Quality for the interactive marketing agency and was getting ready for what would be a couple of years of part-time contracts as I took care of my child and then children). I said then that I wondered how the play would get stretched into a 100 minute movie. And the answer, apparently, is not well.

The plot: Four men (played by Alan Arkin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and Jack Lemmon) work selling dubious real estate lots in Arizona and Florida. Their manager (played by Kevin Spacey) parcels out two leads to each every day, leads that come from people who filled out cards, perhaps in the supermarket to enter a contest (as was the fashion at the time). Each will apparently do or say anything to get someone to buy a lot. One day, they arrive at work in the afternoon or evening to find Alec Baldwin–well, the downtown sales manager guy–come to give them the famous speech (“Coffee is for closers.”) and to tell them they’re all fired except for the man who sells the most that month (current leader: the guy played by Pacino). Baldwin then taunts them with a set of premium leads for the Glengarry Glen Ross project, but gives them to the sales manager (Spacey) who locks them in his office.

One of the men (Harris) tries to get another of the salesmen (Arkin) to help him break into the office to steal those leads, and the majority of the film is Harris trying to convince Arkin, Lemmon working the leads he’s given, and Pacino taking the long way to sell to the guy who played Seamus in Ronin (what was in the case? I don’t remember.).

That’s it. The movie has a handful of sets: The office, the Chinese restaurant across the street, the street, a phone booth, a car interior, and a sales prospect’s house. So it’s kind of a throwback of a film like one you get from the 30s or 40s where it’s clearly directly translated from the play.

A bit of an anachronism, although perhaps just a touch when it came out, as the land sales thing was not as big in the 1990s as it was in decades past. I did, however, buy it when I was on vacation using “points” that we bought as part of the modern timeshare that we’ve had for, what, almost a decade? It’s been worth it to us, but your mileage may vary. It was not lost on me, though, that I bought this DVD while on a vacation made possible by a sales pitch much like the ones depicted in the film. Many years later, I still have most of the balance on one of the gift cards given as a lure. Because it’s for Bass Pro Shops, and I am not muvh of an outdoorsman. The only thing I’ve used it for was a camouflage hat for my father’s grave.