Reddit mentions of All in the Timing: Fourteen Plays

Is Tarantino a "great writer of dialogue?" Personally, I don't think so. I think that he is a very talented director who has mastered the understanding of the "bomb under the table" technique of building suspense.

For example, Inglorious Basterds opens with a scene of Col. Hans Landa sitting down for a smoke and a chat with a dairy farmer. There's nothing particularly interesting about this dialogue. Nothing at all. It's very ordinary.

What makes the scene compelling, though, is the fact that the audience is aware that the dairy farmer is hiding a Jewish family and that Landa is a Nazi. Additionally, Landa explicitly tells the farmer of his "Jew Hunter" nickname.

As per Hitchcock, we have two men having a conversation for five minutes while sitting at the kitchen table. A Jewish family is literally under the table. One of the men is hiding that family and the other man is hunting that family. They could talk about anything at all. Milk. Tobacco. Baseball. It doesn't matter what. The audience will be in suspense for the duration of that scene because we know that something is going to happen at the end of it.

The scene isn't memorable because of any specific lines of dialogue that the characters speak. It's memorable because the situation is dramatic.

Credit to Tarantino, of course, for writing this scene in a dramatic way. A lesser writer might have had the Nazis storm into the cabin and interrogate the farmer. Instead, Tarantino has created a character in Landa who is unsettlingly civil with a penchant for pageantry. And yes, the dialogue reveals Lando's character and raises the stakes of the plot, so it certainly is "good" in that it does what dialogue is supposed to do.

What's great about this scene, though, is that it builds tension in other scenes throughout the movie.

Later in the film, Landa sits down at a cafe with Shoshanna, the lone survivor of the previous scene. Tarantino has firmly established that Landa knows where Jews are hiding. And Tarantino has firmly established that Landa prefers to indulge in a bit of theater and pomp before unleashing his violence.

So when he sits down at the table with Shoshanna, the audience feels as though there is a bomb under the table once again, and we're confident -- if not certain -- that this scene will end the same as the earlier scene. So it's excruciating to watch Landa order pie and engage in small talk because of the suspense the film has earned by showing us nearly the exact same scene.

Of course, this time the scene ends differently. Landa really just wanted some pie and has no idea that Shoshanna is Jewish. This comes as a pretty big surprise to the audience. It also furthers to build suspense throughout the rest of the film because now we can't be sure if any conversation is going to end in an explosion of violence or a polite parting.

The dialogue in these scenes, though, is only ancillary. Anybody could have written the dialogue in these scenes and the scenes still would have played out with the same sense of suspense and urgency thanks to Tarantino's excellent direction and Christolph Waltz's fantastic characterization.

Before I sat down to right this mini-essay, I simply thought, "Tarantino isn't a great writer of dialogue." Writing this analysis, though, forced me to think about what Tarantino does as a writer and why it works within the context of his scripts ... and these insights will help me in my writing in the future.

So I suppose that this is ultimately a rather long-winded way of saying that I think it's more important to analyze why we enjoy and remember the dialogue of our favorite films than it is to simply list our favorites.

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tl;dr ... David Mamet, David Ives, Billy Wilder, Tom Stoppard, William Goldman and John Hughes

David Ive's one acts are generally a simple set. Most of them might be too short for what you're wanting though. They are utterly hilarious though and a lot of fun to do in my opinion. You can get a collection of 14 of his one acts pretty cheap in his "All in the Timing" collection.