Salesman (film)
Encyclopedia
Salesman is a 1969 direct cinema
Direct Cinema
Direct Cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America, principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and the United States...

 documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 directed by brothers Albert and David Maysles
Albert and David Maysles
Albert and David Maysles were a documentary filmmaking team whose cinéma vérité works include Salesman , Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens . Their 1964 film on The Beatles forms the backbone of the DVD, The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit...

, and Charlotte Zwerin
Charlotte Zwerin
Charlotte Zwerin was a documentary film director and editor best known for work concerning artists or musicians, although she also made films concerning other subjects....

.

Synopsis

The documentary follows four salesmen as they travel across New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...

 and Southeast Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

 trying to sell expensive Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

s door-to-door in low-income neighborhoods and attend a meeting in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. The film focuses in particular on the struggles of salesman Paul Brennan, a middle-aged Irish-American
Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau...

 Roman Catholic from Jamaica Plain, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, who struggles to keep up his sales.

Interviews and the salesmen

  • Jamie Baker, "The Rabbit"
  • Paul Brennan, "The Badger"
  • Raymond Martos, "The Bull"
  • Charles McDevitt, "The Gipper"
  • Kennie Turner
  • Melbourne I. Feltman
  • Margaret McCarron

Production

Just short of seven minutes into the film, one of the two cameras used is shown being operated, in a shot from the other. The handheld microphone used to record the film's sound is visible in some shots.

Elements of popular culture that appear as backdrops to the main story include the song "If I Were a Rich Man", from Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in Tsarist Russia in 1905. It is based on Tevye and his Daughters by Sholem Aleichem...

; a recorded orchestral performance of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...

' song "Yesterday
Yesterday (song)
"Yesterday" is a song originally recorded by The Beatles for their 1965 album Help!. The song first hit the United Kingdom top 10 three months after the release of Help!. The song remains popular today with more than 1,600 cover versions, one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded...

"; The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is a talk show hosted by Johnny Carson under the Tonight Show franchise from 1962 to 1992. It originally aired during late-night....

; and televised boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...

 matches.

In the scene beginning about one hour and four minutes into the documentary, the film has been flipped horizontally, as evidenced by the parts in the men's hair, the breast pockets on their shirts and jackets, and the collar button behind Brennan's tie, as well as the layout of their motel room.

As stated in the closing credits,
The filming team of Albert and David Maysles went home to Boston to take another look at the kind of people they grew up with. The idea for the film was researched and developed by David Maysles[,] who found the salesmen. The photography was by Albert Maysles. The film was edited by David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin.


Salesman was filmed in January 1967 (perhaps also late December 1966) and bears a copyright date of 1968.

Critical response

When the film was first released, Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

, film critic for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, lauded the film and wrote, "...[the] 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
Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...

 or direct cinema...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."

Awards

In 1992, Salesman was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board, established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, was reauthorized by acts of Congress in 1992, 1996, 2005, and again in October 2008...

 by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

 as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

External links

  • Salesman official website
  • Salesman essay at the Criterion Collection by Toby Miller
  • Salesman at DVD Beaver (includes images)
  • Salesman film clip at You Tube (characters summary)
  • Salesman film at Hulu
    Hulu
    Hulu is a website and over-the-top subscription service offering ad-supported on-demand streaming video of TV shows, movies, webisodes and other new media, trailers, clips, and behind-the-scenes footage from NBC, Fox, ABC, and Obstacle on October 20th 2011 Nickelodeon and CBS and many other...

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