NOTES FROM LIFE'S UNDERBELLY: David Mamet's `Glengarry Glen Ross'

Icounted. Al Pacino, fire-mouthed, hell-bent and irresistably cool, had indeed said it over 160 times. "Fuck." "Fuck you." "You fucking asshole." "Get the fuck out of here." By the time he landed dead in a pool swelling with the red of his own blood at the end of "Scarface," Pacino had become a hero to the dispossessed. He was the toughest bad guy in Hollywood, and only a wave of submachine-gun fire powerful enough to crack the USS New Jersey in two could bring him to his final, glorious swan dive.

What those watching and listening to Pacino's devilish sound-bites had been overpowered by was his believability. Pacino was not Pacino; he was Scarface. By that token, though, he never is. In "Glengarry Glen Ross," the new movie based on the play by David Mamet, Pacino is a salesman, Ricky Roma.

He sells us on the idea that life stinks when you're at the bottom. The mud of American society is filled with salesmen. They make little money, fight insanely hard for it and go home with no pride at the end of the day. Pacino, in the role of Roma, has made it to the top of this dung heap.

He is the indisputable master of earthly hell and knows it; wherever he goes, Pacino manipulates, sells and scrounges. If one ever wonders where Roma gets his incredible powers, she need look no further than the devil himself. Only Satan could inspire treachery like Ricky Roma's: He won't go back on a sale even if it means it will cost the customer his marriage; he feeds the egos of co-workers in order to maintain their tenuous loyalties; Roma even sits back when the co-worker he adored just five minutes ago is pegged by the police.

The other characters in "Glengarry Glen Ross" make it easy for Pacino to be bad: Jack Lemmon fills the role of Shelly Levene, an overworked, unconfident shadow of a "great" salesman ten years past his prime. Lemmon simpers and croons to customers, selling his soul to regain an irretrievable glory. In the end, he makes a good feast for Roma when the sleazy real estate sales company that puts a roof over both their heads crucifies him.

Blake (Alec Baldwin) makes a cameo, bringing in his steel briefcase the old themes from "Downtown": "Closers get more leads (names to call on) and losers get out." Blake has no mercy for leftovers like Levene. He delicately encourages those who don't like it to "get the fuck out" and taunts those who stay with the fact that his watch costs more than each of their cars. If you can't sell his trashy property deals, you're nobody to Blake.

Blake is on a different eschelon of bad than Roma. Blake flaunts intimidation while Roma cleverly disguises it--a sleaze factor that keeps Roma securely at the post of King Evil.

Of course, because "Glengarry Glen Ross" takes place in New York, it usually rains in torrents and the movie takes us clear to the underside of contemporary life like nothing since "Death of a Salesman." Unfortunately, another painful parallel to "Salesman" is that the film uses only a fraction of the potential that the medium bestows upon it. The scenes are limited and we rarely see any kind of action other than frustrated rampages and darkly philosophical dialogues.

The fact that director James Foley sticks too close to play format deprives "Glengarry" the possibilities that film give it. Instead, only the mighty but topically depressing performances by Lemmon, Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and Pacino keep us interested. We receive no alternate stimulation by movement, day-light or more than the five principal actors.

The movie's plot is also stunted; their is no story involved, just a point: salesmen suck, life sucks. None of the characters accomplish anything, they just sink deeper into the depths of real estate salesmanship and the vile morass of life.

Other than witnessing Pacino's versatility, Baldwin's corporate intensity, Harris' moral indignance and Lemmon's superbly pitiful side-stepping, "Glengarry Glen Ross" is better seen as a stage production. And it's best seen after you've had enough sunshine to combat the film's dour undercurrent.