The Greatest Salesman Documentary in the World

Some of my favorite films are documentaries. By documentary, I don't mean propaganda, in which footage depicting real events is spliced together in a misleading way. (Not that there's anything wrong with a good, solidly made exposé: I loved Super Size Me and the less substantiated, but highly entertaining, Kurt and Courtney.)

Nor am I referring to the kind of scripted "reality" that has become prevalent in the last decade, though I will admit to having greatly enjoyed a movie called Sex with Strangers even as I recognized the contrivance of a neat storyline in its tale of five "swingers". (I rewrote the last sentence, which originally included the dubious-sounding phrase, "I enjoyed Sex with Strangers"--a great example of how"factual" material can be manipulated to say something else entirely.)

An example of a great documentary on politics and historic events is the Occult History of the Third Reich series: though I've watched literally hundreds of hours about the Nazis and World War II (okay, I'm a little sick), these three discs stand out above all the rest. But most notable documentaries of the past few decades are concerned not with the grand sweep of things, but rather with portraying a very small, unusual corner of society: for example, skateboarding misfits (Dog Town and Z-Boys, basis for the feature Lords of Dogtown); trash-talking and sometimes truly frightening street hustlers (American Pimp); Texas fundamentalists with a rather twisted take on Halloween (Hell House); or a gaggle of moviegoing geeks (Cinemania).

Add to this list--at the top of this list--the amazing Salesman (1968), about Irish Catholic door-to-door Bible peddlers in Boston and Florida in 1967. If you loved Tin Men, and loved/hated Glengarry Glen Ross (to me, perhaps the most truly terrifying film ever made), then Salesman is one to see. I repeatedly petitioned Netflix to add it to their list, and though they've been pretty responsive about some things, they never acquired this one. So I finally bought it from Amazon, and though it's on the expensive side, it's definitely worth it. Or as the guys in the movie might say (putting on an exaggerated brogue), "How much do you think you'd be able to set aside on a monthly basis for this beautiful bound edition of the sacred texts, Mrs. O'Connor? For the security of knowing that your children are being raised in the traditions of the saints and the sacraments? What if I told you that you could have this peace of mind for just $7.95 a month?"

To anybody who's ever worked in door-to-door or in-home sales, been involved in a multilevel, or otherwise tried to proselytize in some uphill situation, Salesman will elicit many a heartfelt guffaw or frisson or sheer horror. And yet that's only part of the authenticity that makes this film so remarkable. Too many directors today, if given these same materials, would try to carve out a storyline around some boring, shopworn critique of Christianity and capitalism, but filmmakers Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin did something much more difficult. Simply by sticking close to their subjects--including the unforgettable Paul "the Badger" Brennan, who has to have been David Mamet's model for the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry--they allow the personalities and events to express themselves in a way that speaks to timeless issues of honor, achievement, and sheer survival.

This undoubtedly necessitated the shooting of hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage, just to get the very best stuff--for instance, the scene where an oblivious husband cranks a sickly-sounding string version of "Yesterday" while the Bible dude tries to close his sale with the curler-wearing wife. It was an astonishing scene, precisely because it was the mid-1960s, before the average Joe had discovered irony, postmodernism, or self-reference. In other words, it's a safe bet that these people weren't encouraged to ham it up ala The Osbournes; they were just being themselves, and that was more than entertaining enough.

Though by far the greatest "salesman" I have ever personally known is a woman--my wife Deidre, founder of The Knight Agency--both Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross are dominated by male figures. (Except perhaps in the background of the restaurant where the characters hang out for half the movie, you don't even see a woman in Glengarry.) In both movies, the role of the male is reduced to the most fundamental demands and expectations placed on him by millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of tradition. In both, men compete with varying degrees of success for key positions at the head of the pack, while an older man is forced to ask himself if he still has what it takes to survive. Without apparent contrivance, the film develops a powerful storyline, and the dialogue that spills from the mouths of Paul and his comrades along the way is better than most writers could ever hope to create.

[Maysles Productions has a Web site that includes a list by Albert Maysles of his own professional guidelines as a documentary maker. In pulling up all the links above, most of which go to Netflix listings, I ended up adding about fifty new documentaries to my personal film queue. One that's apparently no longer available, though I saw it about ten years ago, is Chickenhawk, which concerns the North American Man-Boy Love Association or NAMBLA. Apparently the film has been withdrawn from circulation, though I can't imagine how anyone could construe it as treating NAMBLA favorably. ]