In October 1992, two startlingly similar indie dramas hit art houses across the country. Both featured all-male casts, sturdy ensembles of well-dressed men spouting tough-guy dialogue. Both would become notorious for their proficiency in profanity (one notched 269 instances of the F-word; the other, a comparatively tame 138). Both offered grim worldviews and 1970s-style bummer endings. And though both were ostensibly about a robbery, each carefully avoided showing the crime itself — to better allow their writers to withhold vital information until the conclusion.
Neither “Glengarry Glen Ross” (released on Oct. 2) nor “Reservoir Dogs” (three weeks later) made much of an impression at the box office that fall. But their influence was heavily felt in the ensuing decades — and from this vantage point, 30 years on, they have much to tell us about the state of masculinity in America at the end of the (first) Bush era.
Their origins couldn’t have been more different. “Glengarry,” which concerns a quartet of desperate real estate salesman and the theft of a cache of premium sales leads, was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by David Mamet; the agent-turned-producer Jerry Tokofsky spent five years assembling the cast and raising the financing to turn it into a film, persuading such marquee names as Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin to slash their usual fees for the pleasure of mouthing Mamet’s distinctive dialogue.
