Reviews and notes

If truth is beauty, this 1968 indie doc is harrowingly beautiful, a spiritual kin to Studs Terkel's everyday-people oral histories. The black-and-white film, made by the underheralded Maysles Brothers duo (and their staff of exactly three other people), follows four traveling Bible salesmen from hotel to motel, door to door, as they try to scrape livings out of other people's faith. It's more pathetic than Death of a Salesman: These Boston boys relentlessly repress their economic and spiritual desperation beneath brittle optimism and weary humor, their self-regard pinched narrow as their ties. The film eventually focuses on Paul, an Irish Catholic fellow who's far too bright and miles too deep for this soul-sucking gig. A former whiz kid and Dennis Hopper lookalike, he's lost his knack and can't get it back. As he sinks deeper into mid-life depression, his sales drop to nil, and he begins to quietly implode. The Maysles get incredibly natural "performances" from their subjects: Paul either seems unaware of the camera or he's a natural-born film actor, his grim face saying everything his voice cannot. He didn't do what his family probably expected ? that is, "join the farce an' git a pinchun" (as he incants over and over in a sardonic false brogue). Instead, he chose independence, freedom, the open road ? and he got the shaft.
- Kate Sullivan, City Pages.


The film is an extraordinary achievement in nonfiction film making, for it gives dramatic shape and structure to the words and actions of real people, and in such a way that the viewer has the definite feeling of 'being there'. There does not appear to be any cinematic equivalent of the proscenium arch between us and the four salesmen, and their words and actions - most of all, their words - are so close to what we would expect that we have the feeling that they are reading lines in a script. But that is the paradox and the achievement of the new nonfiction film, as well as the special hallmark of SALESMAN. It brings us to that thin and wonderful region between fact and fiction, turning upside down what we might expect and, at the same time, confirming what we knew was there all along.

At the outset, the subject of SALESMAN - the door-to-door activities of Bible salesmen - seems special, even precious, the sort of thing that Tennessee Williams might make into a play, but hardly the subject for a full-length objective film. And it is to this skepticism that the film is addressed, for at its heart is the central conflict between material and spiritual values. Here, the salesmen realise that their task is not so much to sell printed books, as it is to get a customer to examine his faith. In that split second between faith and doubt (the books cost dearly), the sale is usually made. SALESMAN follows four representatives of the Mid-American Bible Company in their selling territories of Boston and Florida: Paul Brennan, known as 'The Badger'; Charles McDevitt, 'The Gipper'; James Baker, 'The Rabbit'; and Raymond Martos, 'The Bull'.

Because of his gift of the gab and his sales pitch ('This is not the Irish blarney, it comes right from the heart') and his outward personality, Paul is the focus of the film. He inevitably brings to mind Willy Loman from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, for like Willy, he is losing touch, sales, and self-confidence, and is a sympathetic character. The aspect that separates him from his partners, though, is none of these characteristics, although they are very important; Paul is a natural actor, unaware of the camera, able to spin yarns, to reminisce, to laugh at adversity. Like another fictional counterpart, Harry Hickey in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, represents more than just a salesman fallen on hard times. He is caught in an existential dilemma, trapped between the meaninglessness of his job and the dictates of his heart. He would be interesting if he were selling heavy machinery, or shoes, or insurance, but he is selling the Bible...

SALESMAN is about Paul, about loneliness, about people's need for expensive books to confirm a faith that a strange salesman can talk them into, about the guilt they feel when they don't want the book or can't afford it, about American society and its values. It is not a pretentious film, nor a particularly deep one. Its surface shimmers with unforgettable people, houses, and comments. At times, some of them seem too 'real' to be real: the Irish mother and daughter in Boston; the vice-president of the company that publishes the Bible, Melbourne I Feltman, Ph D, the 'world's greatest salesman of the world's best seller'; the elderly widow whom Paul persuades into buying a Bible ('Well, I don't know how many years I have to read the Bible'); and the married couple straight out of a satire on American living customs, he in his undershirt, she with her hair in curlers, the hi-fi playing a heavily orchestrated version of The Beatles' Yesterday.

All of these moments, and many more, make SALESMAN a sociological document to be treasured. Against this fabric, we see Paul, conning, joking, laughing, doubting, cursing. Paul and the other people mirror each other. He sells a Bible that costs $49.95 and can be paid for by one of three plans: 'Cash, COD, and also they have a little Catholic Honor Plan. Which plan would be the best for you, the A, B, or C?' It is a perfect example of SALESMAN's masterful nonfiction film reporting that we don't know whether this representative bit of Paul's wit is a joke on him, on his customers, or on us.

SALESMAN is notable for its superb photography and sound recording, for its ability to sustain nonfiction reporting in a full-length film, and for its direct, penetrating look at an American institution - the door-to-door salesman. It is distinguished by its originality, by its intelligent handing of its subject matter, and by its fidelity to truth. And it will be remembered for many things, including the Maysles-Zwerin achievement of understanding and respecting the line between fiction and fact.
-Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film, Allen & Unwin, 1973.

Weblink: Review by James Kendrick, QNetwork.com

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