[In the following review of Glengarry Glen Ross, Kauffmann studies the structural differences between the film version and the original play.]

David Mamet wrote the screenplay of Glengarry Glen Ross, and the difference from his original play underscores one of his attributes: his sensitivity to form. It clearly wasn't enough for him to do the usual rotisserie slicing of a play for film serving, cutting it up and rearranging it differently on the platter, with a garnish of material that was only described in the play and can now be shown. Mamet obviously wanted to reshape the work, to gather it back into himself and give it a new manifestation.

The play is in two acts, designed so that their two differing shapes support the inner action of the piece. Act One has three scenes, each between two men, each in a Chinese restaurant. (The place connotes low-price luxe.) Each scene virtually slams us face-to-face with its characters in a situation that leaves them disclosed, quivering. Four of the six men are salesmen for the same pressure-cooked real estate firm; one is their boss; the sixth is a stranger who ends up as a customer of one of them. Overall, the act is like a triptych depicting a series of secular crucifixions.

Act Two is the secular Calvary, the real estate office, the place from which those three scenes derive and toward which they return. This act is one long continuous scene. To change figures, it's as if the three tributaries of the first act fed into and swelled a stream.

For the film, Mamet decided that the abutment of two different “act” structures would not serve. Apparently he thought that the opening three duologues, so gripping in the theater, would look stagey on the screen. He opted then to give the whole picture the same texture throughout.

Working backward, so to speak, he rendered the materials of Act One to blend filmically with Act Two, though not in one setting, not in one continuous scene like the second half. He reworked Act One into short scenes, so that, instead of three substantial scenes feeding into a long one, the film is a set of small pieces that assemble into a mosaic. I can't say that the new form is as powerful as the original, but perhaps this is because I so admire the play. In any case, the new form functions well on film and is in its own way a conduit for several kinds of darkness.

The place, unspecified, is presumably Chicago; the time is unspecified but presumably it's the 1960s. (Mamet, I've read, worked in a Chicago real estate office when he was young.) Four salesmen are scrabbling to sell chunks of real estate in Florida and elsewhere to middle-class people as investments. The film's title is the name of a real estate development. The four men have been pitted against one another in a sales contest with a Cadillac as first prize. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize: “You're fired.”

Here are the four salesmen, three of them worn, one of them rapt. Shelley Levene, the oldest, almost but not quite over the hill. (In the play he mentions a daughter. In the film Mamet puts that daughter in a hospital to turn up the heat on Levene.) George Aaronow, a plodder. Dave Moss, a wiry schemer. And Ricky Roma, the youngest, the ace of the team, cocky, successful because he is intoxicated with the rituals of selling.

Their immediate chief is John Williamson, a stooge for the main office downtown. For the film, Mamet has added Blake, a slick emissary from downtown. Blake is there to crack the whip and to crystallize the contempt in which the salesmen are held. (Roma is absent during Blake's one scene.) This he does in the usual vile language of the play.

A note on that language. It jars only for the first few minutes. Unlike the gutter spillage of so many films, which never ceases to jar, Mamet's dialogue quickly shows that it's not vulgar just because vulgarity is now licensed: it comes out of these men as a petty revenge on the lives that they are in.

“Leads” are the key to their selling. These leads are the names of prospects provided by the firm; and the quality of those leads, good or less good, is a sentence of success or failure, almost self-perpetuating. A salesman who does well gets good leads, others get dimmer ones. So failure spawns failure, unless there's a stroke of good luck—with leads or with customers.

This condition produces the second half of the film (Act Two originally), which follows a robbery in the office. Someone broke in and stole a fresh, juicy set of leads. Management has called the police. The ending is in one way surprising, in another way not.

The actors understand Mamet's dialogue: the racing, the broken sentences, the sense that the mouth is trying frantically to keep up with frantic thoughts and with the hints of response in others—all this varied with occasional unfurlings of rhetoric. Good dialogue is always contrapuntal: what is said runs alongside what is not said. Mamet, somewhat under the tutelage of Pinter (whom he reveres), has widened the space between the two concurrent lines of force. (Was he on hand to work with these actors?)

As Levene, Jack Lemmon suppresses much of the surface “indicating” he has been doing lately and cuts much closer to the bone. Alan Arkin breathes mild mediocrity as Aaronow, and Ed Harris gives Moss the bitter slyness he needs. The office boss, Kevin Spacey, is adequate, and, in his brief appearance as Blake, the bastard from downtown, Alec Baldwin wields smoking iron. Another leading actor in a small role: the English star, Jonathan Pryce, is reticently pitiful as the stranger whom Roma overwhelms. But acting honors go, as inevitably they must if Roma is well played, to Al Pacino.

Pacino is a Mamet veteran. His theater performance in American Buffalo remains in the mind as a landmark of naturalistic acting plumbed so far that it went deeper than detail and found essence—the same poetic essence that any artistic style, well practiced, must reach. Pacino understands that Mamet's purpose is not mere stenography, at which he easily excels, but the contemporary music of the gab and the agony under it. Pacino reminds us here that Mamet's antecedent is not Gorky but the expressionism of Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller.

But Roma's role, as adapted for film, brings up my one real grievance. In Roma's first scene, he strikes up a conversation with a stranger in the Chinese restaurant, and after much talk, almost all of it his, he succumbs to his habit, his fix, his obsession. He starts to sell real estate to the stranger just because he can't help doing it, even as he disparages what he's doing. The whole monologue, which it virtually is, from conversational start through pungent musings to the sheer ecstasy of selling, is one of the finest Dionysian swirls in twentieth-century American drama. In the film it is interrupted by a cut to another pair for a while, after which we return for the finish of the soliloquy. I regretted the interruption very much.

James Foley directed with emphasis on large close-ups, perhaps trying to recapture the feeling of the theater's Act One on film. Juan Ruiz Anchia's cinematography is too lush. It didn't need to be grim, but these rich colors are inapt without being ironic. Still, the film is a harrowing rendition of the excellent play. It confirms that Mamet achieved the work about the fake-smiling drudges of the business world that, some thirty-five years earlier, Arthur Miller had been groping for. Mamet's salesmen don't literally die. They don't need to. A worse death has already begun.