“We’re a dying breed,” says a real-estate salesman to his colleague near the end of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross.” It’s meant as an elegiac statement of solidarity, but there’s nothing friendly about it, and nothing noble, either. Instead, the line has a predatory subtext. It suggests that if guys like this are going extinct, it’s because they’re killing each other off.
The plot of Glengarry Glen Ross hinges on a competition: the employees at a branch office of the shady NYC real estate firm Premiere Properties pitted against one another by their parent company in an act of pure, Darwinian capitalism. It’s survival of the fittest amongst lame ducks. After outlining the incentives for the victor and the runner-up—a Cadillac El Dorado and a set of steak knives, respectively—swinging dick Blake (Alec Baldwin), having driven his BMW all the way “from downtown...from Mitch and Murray...on a mission of mercy” clarifies the stakes of this month’s sales contest even further. “Third prize is you’re fired,” he says, flatly. There are four men on the sales team.
Mamet’s masterpiece premiered in 1983, at a moment when the promises of the ’60s counterculture had been eaten alive by the profit motive. It was adapted for the screen in 1992, but Glengarry Glen Ross endures because its themes are timeless. In fact, it’s currently celebrating a revival on Broadway. It’s a perfect time to revisit this film (or play if you can get to NYC) because we’re living in an historic moment of antagonistic masculinity.
Director James Foley assembled a world class cast for his film adaptation. And with good reason. The script begs for actors who can flex their thespian hackles as well as their show muscles. Jack Lemmon plays the downward trending veteran salesman Shelley “The Machine” Levene and his performance informs this liked but not well-liked man far outside the confines of the film. Al Pacino was nominated for his performance as Richie Roma, equally gifted at curse-craft as he is as a silver-tongued salesman. It’s almost unfair that Alec Baldwin nearly steals the show in his one scene, an extra few pages that Mamet penned for the film adaptation. In a script full of quotable lines I guarantee most of the ones you’ve heard come from Baldwin himself.
Revisiting this 40-year-old script 2025 once again proves that things really haven’t changed much at all in America. Glengarry Glen Ross is packed with locker room talk that’s still touted by the likes of President Trump and his nearest and dearest. The film is absent of any significant female characters, other than multiple and suggestive references to absent wives and girlfriends. The men’s exchanges take the form of verbal fencing with characters consistently lashing out and smacking each other below the belt.
The worst offender in the gutter mouthed Olympics of this movie belongs to Roma, who’s bottomless slew of playground insults underline his oversexualized lexicon. While Shelley, Moss, and George (Alan Arkin) are sitting through Blake’s accusatory “sales conference,” Roma is in a Chinese restaurant bar laying his best lines on lonely, wretched James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce), a married man who mentions his wife compulsively but nevertheless gives the impression of discreet, insecure homosexuality. Though Roma misses Blake’s lecture about sales taking “brass balls” he too spends his time trying to relate to Lingk through stories of masculine sexual experience.
The Roma-Lingk relationship has been interpreted within Glengarry Glen Ross’ overtly masculine framework as an opportunistic, predatory seduction. Lingk’s after-the-fact attempts at reneging on the deal—showing up at the office, eyes down, stammering apologies—are shaded by what feels like lover’s guilt. Power, and the ways it gets expressed, complicated, and sublimated through language and inflection—has always been Mamet’s great theme, dating back to the 1987 film House of Games and its talkative card sharps. Glengarry’s dialogue is divided between characters like Blake and Roma, with their alpha-male vocabularies, talking victory laps around their opponents, and weak willed stammerers like Lingk and George, who simply aren’t equipped to do battle.
It’s George who gets dominated in the script’s most brilliantly written scene, centering on a thought experiment that gets stealthily redeveloped into an ultimatum. Here, Mamet defines the difference between “speaking” and “talking” (“we’re just speaking about it;” “we’re not actually talking about it?”) while melding George’s anxieties about completion (“I can’t push through”) with the economic and intellectual insecurities that would let him get bullied incrementally into becoming his colleague’s accomplice. “Because you listened,” Moss chides George when asked why he’d try to turn him into an accessory, emphasizing the perils in Mamet’s universe of providing a sympathetic ear. If Moss is the character most humiliated by Blake’s dick-measuring tirade (“See this watch? This watch cost more than your car”), he’s also the one who internalizes and regurgitates the same language of intimidation, which works well with a mousy opponent like George, but fails when clashing the next day with Roma.
The cash strapped, self-deluded Shelley is the film’s designated neuter. His arc concludes with getting his balls cut off in front of the whole office. Shelley the character is certainly in debt to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman but “The Machine” is a new kind of male loser. Lemmon’s primary duet partner in the film is Spacey, and their big back-and-forth, in which Shelley tries to bribe Spacey’s Williamson—the office manager, and a cold fish—into releasing the premium leads plays on the generational theme previously drawn out by having young buck Baldwin bad-mouthing so many hallowed, middle-age-and-older actors. (Foley consistently shoots Spacey lurking in the background of Baldwin’s close-ups, like a henchman).
Shelley’s primary point of contention with Williamson is that the younger man lacks experience,.Blake’s curt order to Shelley during their lone interaction to “put that coffee down...coffee is for closers” is defiantly proven by Shelley closing an $80,000 sale with a reluctant couple, and yet, in Mamet’s cruelest twist, closure proves irrelevant when the clients’ check is destined to bounce. “They’re insane,” Williamson smirks, twisting the (steak) knife once and for all, luxuriating in a final act of verbal castration. “They just like talking to salesmen.”
The subtext of Glengarry Glen Ross is that, for all their anger and resentment, these salesmen like talking to one another; we get that these are arguments they’ve had before. Not that they have much choice for companionship, as their form of labor has rendered normal human relationships almost impossible. (One wonderful detail I always come back to: when Shelley artificially inflates his position during phone calls by interjecting orders to his non-existent secretary, her name is “Grace,” rather pathetically indicating a quality he lacks). The glee that Mamet takes in articulating their hostilities keeps his play—and the movie made from it—from reducing to a simplistic capitalist analysis, or even a critique. He’s even more interested in syntax than morality, and even before his post–9/11 slide into MAGA territory, he toggled brazenly between ignoring and belittling political correctness. (One notable change between the movie and the play is the omission of several ostentatious, anti-Indian tirades, drawn from the author’s observation of industry racism during his year-long immersion in a Chicago real-estate office; their insidious sentiment is conveyed simply in the movie through Pacino’s incredulous pronunciation of the surname “Patel” as a catch-all for the deadbeat leads he and his co-workers refuse to chase any further.)
Death of a Salesman is a no-dry-eye-in-the-house tragedy; Glengarry Glen Ross is more like an anthropological study, closer in some ways to the Maysles’ pavement-pounding 1969 documentary, Salesman in that its true protagonist is a way of life, or a discipline. And, like that film, Mamet withholds judgment on said discipline and its participants or at least refuses to impose it from above. Even after George utters “God, I hate this job” he picks up the phone and resumes trying to sell. No one in this story learns a single thing and because of that they all remain miserable lonely men. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a lesson for the ages.
