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Salesman (1969)

1969 | Documentary

91 mins

Four dogged door-to-door Bible salesmen travel from Boston to Florida on a seemingly futile quest to sell luxury editions of the Good Book to working-class Catholics.



Produced by Maysles
Director Albert Maysles and David Maysles
Cast Paul Brennan, Charles McDevitt and James Baker

Images And Data Courtesy Of: Maysles.
This content (including text, images, videos and other media) is published and used in accordance with Fair Use.

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Salesman (1969) reviews from people you don't follow
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Robert Greene recommended (curated)

 
Salesman (1969)
Salesman (1969)
1969 | Documentary
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Nothing can prepare a young cinephile for the thrill of Direct Cinema. What you’re expecting to see (voice-over, explanation, facts, message) is replaced with plain-note observation of the human creature, which is the most dramatic and psychologically charged thing. Salesman is the uncle who gave me my first baseball mitt."

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40x40

Neil LaBute recommended (curated)

 
Salesman (1969)
Salesman (1969)
1969 | Documentary
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"The brothers Maysles offer up two of their most stunning documentaries, and, frankly, I can’t choose between them. Beautiful essays on what it is to be American and, more importantly, human; visually hypnotic and oddly life affirming. Did I mention that they’re also, by turns, hilarious and heartbreaking?"

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Joshua Z Weinstein recommended (curated)

 
Salesman (1969)
Salesman (1969)
1969 | Documentary
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"This might have been the first film that made me realize what type of filmmaker I was going to be. The faces and personalities are so vivid. I always wonder if people would care about this simply observed masterpiece if it were produced today, after the advent of reality TV and YouTube."

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Jean-Pierre Gorin recommended (curated)

 
Salesman (1969)
Salesman (1969)
1969 | Documentary
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"In many ways the perfect double bill with Young Mr. Lincoln. Democracy in America, Part II. There is a lot of carbon dating at work in this movie (how an interior, a suit, a gesture spell class—as in middle or working—and the historic moment, 1969, in which these classes function); but this unfurling of specificity is there to give us its metaphysical sense and resonance (the essence of labor, its afferent solitude, the pathos of success). A lot has to do with the amount of space the frame encloses and how resolutely off center it chooses to remain. For all its relentless attention to the matter at hand, Salesman is never a claustrophobic film. It is a film that often goes one (or two or three) better on what a long line of American writers (from Dreiser on) have tried to pin down. Which might explain why Salesman often feels like a valentine to a time in film (and society in general) when work defined character, registering the cusp moment after which it will cease to do so. One can look at Salesman and weep when what rules as “documentary” these days comes to mind; one can—maybe naively—take the film as a perfect illustration of what the genre might still produce; one can celebrate the film as definitively proving the inanity of the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. I tend to go for the latter."

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