In this milestone of direct cinema, brothers Albert and David Maysles, who made this film with editor Charlotte Zwerin, follow four American Bible sellers. The protagonists, with nicknames like “the badger” and “the rabbit,” go door-to-door in shirtsleeves, their cases filled with the biggest bestseller of all time. But the blue-collar families they pitch their sales to have other things on their mind than buying a $49.95 Bible with gold leaf edging.
As is often the case in the Maysles’s observational work, the film is character-driven. The men travel from Boston to Miami, from customers’ living rooms to cheap motel rooms where they spend their time playing cards, bragging about sales, or recounting the time one of them found himself hawking Bibles in a Muslim neighborhood.
Surreptitiously, Salesman (1969) is also a portrait of 1960s America—of an identity that’s rooted in Christianity and consumerism, and entwined with a sales pitch that’s steadily losing its appeal.
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