Film review: Salesman (1968) ****

The American Dream is not about how much you can achieve, but how much you can attain. What could reflect this more than the commercialisation of the very Faith the nation was founded on? Released in 1968, Salesman is a documentary confronting the realities of door-to-door Bible selling, a job founded solely on the principle that its product is one of the biggest sellers in the world. If you’re not making money as a Bible salesman, as one manager tells his workforce in the film, “it’s your fault”.

Enter Paul Brennan (otherwise known as “The Badger”). Travelling from city to city, hotel to hotel, Paul is “living like a king” – or so his wife tells him. Chances are Paul once believed it too. Now though, constantly shuffling from one client to the next, becoming more insistent and aggravated with each failed sale, Paul seems increasingly desperate. Firing off clichés in attempt to sway an audience of housewives, he is himself an upsetting stereotype – Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman transported into the real world. Other salesmen are briefly introduced throughout, but ultimately they serve only as an illustration of how Paul could be, or may once have been.

The black and white handheld camerawork heightens the dreariness of the scenes, but by showing events from a fly-on-the-wall perspective directors Albert and David Maysles largely allow the circumstances to speak for themselves. Yet it is still possible to question the film's ability to showcase uninfluenced authenticity. It is not clear, for example, how far camera presence may have affected clients during sales (one woman of Polish descent seems particularly uncomfortable turning Paul down on film, drawing out the anxiety of his failing pitch), and some scenes feel as if they may have been re-shot more than once. In spite of this though, Salesman remains poignant and saddening; a portrait of one man's loss of purpose, painted in shades of grey. On its release, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times: “It's such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can't imagine its ever seeming irrelevant”. He’s yet to be proved wrong.