122 Salesman

[Martha]

Salesman



This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four dogged door-to-door Bible salesmen as they travel from Boston to Florida on a seemingly futile quest to sell luxury editions of the Good Book to working-class Catholics. A vivid evocation of midcentury malaise that unfolds against a backdrop of cheap motels, smoky diners, and suburban living rooms, Salesman assumes poignant dimensions as it uncovers the way its subjects' fast-talking bravado masks frustration, disappointment, and despair. Revolutionizing the art of nonfiction storytelling with its nonjudgmental, observational style, this landmark documentary is one of the most penetrating films ever made about how deeply embedded consumerism is in America's sense of its own values.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• DVD: High-definition digital transfer, with restored picture and sound
• Blu-ray: New, restored 4K digital transfer, undertaken by the Academy Film Archive, The Film Foundation, and the George Lucas Family Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary from 2001 featuring directors Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
• Television interview from 1968 with directors David and Albert Maysles, conducted by critic Jack Kroll
• New appreciation of the film by actor Bill Hader (Blu-ray only)
• "Globesman," a 2016 episode of the television series Documentary Now! that parodies the film, starring Hader and Fred Armisen (Blu-ray only)
• Audio excerpt from a 2000 episode of NPR's Weekend Edition profiling James Baker, one of the salesmen featured in the film
• Behind-the-scenes photographs (DVD only)
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Chaiken on the Blu-ray

Criterionforum.org user rating averages

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[Matt]

Vincent Canby's original review from the New York Times:

Albert and David Maysles's Salesman, which opened yesterday at the 68th Street Playhouse, is a documentary feature about four door-to-door Bible salesmen who move horizontally through the capitalistic dream. It's such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can't imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what's called cinema vérité or direct cinema.

Salesman is not a total movie—that is, a complete experience—as a fiction film may aspire to be. It is fact, photographed and recorded with extraordinarily mobile camera and sound equipment, and then edited and carefully shaped into a kind of cinematic mural of faces, words, motel rooms, parlors, kitchens, streets, television images, radio music—even weather.

The movie is a record of the adventures of four real-life, Boston-based representatives of the Mid-American Bible Company, filmed over a period of two months, first in and around Boston, then at a sales convention in Chicago, and finally during a sales tour in and around Miami. The focal point is Paul Brennan, a lean, bristly, professional Irish-American who, in the course of the movie, slowly comes to realize his inadequacy as a Bible pitchman. In a very gentle way, Salesman is Paul Brennan's voyage to personal defeat via rented automobile—a gallant Hickey in a Hertz.

Movie purists may object to some of the techniques employed by the Maysles brothers. They have eliminated from the film all evidence that the people being photographed—the salesmen and their customers—are aware of the presence of the camera. Obviously, they also photographed much more material than is included in the finished movie, allowing them to impose a certain narrative order on the events, and with that order, a point of view.

For one reason and another, I've seen Salesman three times, and each time I've been more impressed by what I can only describe as the decency of that point of view. The movie's lower-middle-class, Roman Catholic-oriented landscape is not particularly pretty, nor are the hard-sell tactics employed by the salesmen as they pitch their $49.95 Bibles to lonely widows, Cuban refugees, boozy housewives, and to one young couple that can't even pay its rent. "Be sure to have it blessed," a salesman reminds a customer to whom he's just made a sale, "or you won't get the full benefit from it."

However, everyone in the movie seems to be touched by the Maysleses' compassion, even the Mid-American Bible Company's pious "theological consultant," Melbourne I. Feltman, who, at the Chicago convention, urges the salesmen to go about their "Father's work," adding: "God grant you an abundant harvest." Salesman somehow transcends such surface mockery, partly, I think, because the salesmen really are no less vulnerable than their customers.

Giving the movie its comic and poignant dimension is Brennan's performance as Brennan, a cocky, beady-eyed drummer who finally succumbs to "negative thoughts" after a long period of being unable to make a sale. "I don't want to seem negative," he confesses to a colleague after a fruitless day, "but all I can see here is delinquent accounts." Brennan driving aimlessly through the fake Moorish architecture of Opa-Locka, Florida, where the streets are named after Sinbad and Ali Baba and the City Hall is shaped like a mosque, is an image of America as a worn-out Disneyland that is unforgettable.

Salesman is hardly a romantic movie, but in a curious way, it's just as exotic and strange a journey as any that the late Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Tabu) ever took through the Arctic or the South Seas. It may not be the entire story of America or even of the salesmen themselves (whose private lives are barely touched), but it is a valuable and sometimes very funny footnote to contemporary history.

[Venom]

I remember watching this in documentary class. Great film and essential title of the genre.

[Jerryvonkramer]

This is a truly excellent documentary, I think possibly the greatest I have seen. There total lack of narration and music, the unfussy and in-obtrusive editing style add a real authenticity to it. It feels like a time capsule handed down from a by-gone age.

If David Mamet didn't watch this before writing Glengarry Glen Ross, I'd be very surprised because the main salesman they focus on IS Jack Lemmon's character. You can see the sadness and the desperation in his eyes as he fails to make each and every sale. It's weird how dislikable he is too, you don't feel sorry for him!

I feel this one should have a much bigger reputation than it does - it's not talked about very often.

[jbeall]

Fantastic documentary.

Right out of college, I did door-to-door for a company called DS Max. We sold coupons, and man, was it a demoralizing experience. I actually had conversations that are almost verbatim repetitions of the conversations in Salesman. I hated the work and was terrible at it, so it was more than something of a relief when the company let me go due to poor sales. The practice sales pitch that Ken, who seems like something of a good-natured bully, goes over with the salesmen was eerily familiar.

Anyway, the film does a marvelous job of not judging the characters, but just letting them talk and talk and talk. Paul the Badger's increasing desperation--I wonder if he was the model for Jack Lemmon's character in Glengarry Glen Ross--had such an interesting way of manifesting itself (his terrible Irish brogue). I can't see him lasting much longer with the company, and he's got no other appreciable skills. Depressing, man.

A particularly powerful scene for me was the sales convention, where the editor of the Bible gave his speech claiming that regardless of whether or not their income was down, the salesmen were fulfilling a higher purpose. That kind of crap goes on all the time in sales, even when you're selling coupons(!); the conceit of the entire profession is that you can't for one minute believe that you're just a salesman, because if you do, you'll realize just how shitty your job is. However, the people who perform the best at this job do realize just that, and it allows them to a) avoid lying to themselves, and b) lie with a clear conscience to others. In that regard, even though door-to-door salesmen are almost extinct, the film has some very interesting things to say about the nature of the sales profession.

[swo17]

BD upgrade Mar 10

[movielocke]

The episode of Documentary now!!

That show is so ridiculously good! glad it's getting included.

Note that this is yet another second edition that is only being issued to bluray, the updated version isn't being pushed out on DVD as well.

[britcom68]

I am very much looking forward to this blu-upgrade, especially with the included Documentary Now piece. I am so hopeful - albeit without any concrete reason- that this could mean similar Documentary Now! inclusions on future releases or re-released upgrades. Unless someone has heard something or saw something online, I have come across nothing to suggest that there is a flood-gate opening here between Criterion and Documentary Now.
What is a crying shame though is that so many of the Documentary Now! episodes happen to be parodying Criterion titles which are already out on blu-releases that are not likely to be re-released. I took a look thru all the Documentary Nows I have access to at the moment and it is depressing to think that there is only one strong possible future inclusion at the moment, the Company original cast album parody. And that assumes the rumors earlier this year that Criterion would release this were (a) true, and (b) still operative even after Pennebaker's passing. Somehow I doubt Criterion would bother to put the parodies for Thin Line, Les Blank, and Nanook out. The Morris and Les Blank set were so well curated to begin with I don't see this as likely for any re-release/upgrades just to include the parodies.

[domino harvey]

The first two seasons are already out on Blu-Ray, so there are other ways to get ahold of many of the parodies

[Fred Holywell]

Beaver