Salesman: For God and Company

Filmed over the winter months of early 1967 while canvassing lower-income Catholic neighborhoods in Massachusetts and Florida, our four protagonists are presented to us in type: Paul Brennan, “the Badger”; Charles McDevitt, “the Gipper”; James Baker, “the Rabbit”; Raymond Martos, “the Bull”—their nicknames characterizing something of their indefatigable animal spirits. In the world these four men inhabit, the sixties of our popular imagination are nowhere to be found. Here there’s no Vietnam, no counter­culture, no civil unrest, just the din of daytime radio and television, living-room sets purchased from catalogs, five-and-dime Christmas decorations, Formica tables, and unfiltered cigarettes. Our protagonists spend much of their time in the cinder-block-walled purgatory of motels, calling their wives, playing poker, commiserating over the day’s losses. “If I were a rich man,” Paul sings to Albert’s camera in wry parody of Fiddler on the Roof, “I wouldn’t be going round this shit land . . .”  

Approximately one hundred hours of 16 mm footage was shot and turned over to Zwerin, who set to the task of giving dramatic shape to the material. The editing process took almost two years, during which time the Maysles brothers went to Israel, shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, to make a concert film with Leonard Bernstein (A Journey to Jerusalem, released the following year). It became clear to Zwerin that, structurally, Salesman demanded that Paul Brennan, the most dynamic and perplexing of the four men, be at its center. She showed her rough assemblages to David, who agreed with her about Brennan’s tragicomic screen presence and encouraged her to keep on in the direction she had been going. She began by editing long, cutting together Albert’s virtuosic, magnificently composed shots, then carefully working into them to create something unmoored and sequentially abstract—breaking with the way time generally unfolds in Direct Cinema films and leaving the viewer with a sense at times of drowning in America’s addiction to kitsch. The film reaches a kind of apotheosis as Paul, en route to his next potential sale, finds himself lost in the wilds of Opa-locka, a Miami suburb with a Thousand and One Nights theme, driving past Harem Avenue, Sesame Street, and Sharazad Boulevard, a string-band rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” blaring over the car radio.

Beyond capturing the petty grotesqueries of a consumer culture that would sell one of its foundational texts on a buy-now, pay-later “Christian honor plan,” Salesman is a timeless portrait of a man who, like so many ambitious men and women in America today, is incapable of reconciling his relatively low standing in society with the bright intensity of his inner life. Repeatedly affecting a thick Irish brogue, Paul eschews the phoniness of middle-class security and respectability, namely the promise of a pension, mocking the belief that if the Lord doesn’t provide, the company will. Paul, too independent of spirit, is surrounded by facsimiles of all the smiling, cloying, and desperate faces he has ever known. It has made him a comically cynical man, and ultimately a tragic one, fighting a losing battle against himself. His bitterness over his failure to close sales is compounded by a palpable sense of disbelief that life has somehow cheated him out of a nobler destiny.  

The film had its theatrical premiere in New York at the 68th Street Playhouse on April 17, 1969. While audiences were slow to come around, the critical and intellectual establishment immediately threw its full support behind the film. Harold Clurman, film critic for the Nation, wrote, Salesman “creates its own kind of catharsis. It is a picture for the brave.” Norman Mailer offered that he didn’t know of many movies that “have had as much to say about American life and have said it so well.” At an early screening attended by the filmmakers, one audience member was so moved by the film that she sat in her seat crying after the theater had cleared. Albert approached her. It was Gillian Walker, a young member of New York’s Circle in the Square theater group. The two would later marry, have children, and be together until Albert’s death. 

Salesman also has the distinction of breaking down barriers of directorial “authorship” in documentary film, particularly for women. Zwerin continued to work on Maysles projects until a couple of years after David’s death in 1987, most notably as codirector on Gimme Shelter and Running Fence (1977). She served as a guide and mentor to a host of editors, directors, and producers who, early in their careers, lent their respective talents to Maysles Films: Barbara Kopple, Susan Froemke, Muffie Meyer, and Ellen Hovde, the latter two of whom shared directing credit with the Maysles brothers on Grey Gardens (1975). A passionate lifelong jazz enthusiast, Zwerin’s most personal solo directorial achievement is Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988), a virtuosic portrait of the composer and pianist that expertly weaves together interview, performance, and collective memory. She died in 2004.

Albert’s own passing in 2015 closed the circle on the three creative forces behind Salesman, but the work they produced together firmly established Maysles Films as an institution. Originally located in the theater district of Manhattan, Maysles Films has functioned simultaneously as a studio, a collaborative filmmaking hub, and, more recently, a community-driven documentary education center and cinema in Harlem. Documentarians Errol Morris, Henry Corra, and Joe Berlinger have worked in the studio, cinematographer Sean Price Williams began his professional filmmaking career shooting alongside Albert, and this writer had the enormous privilege of helping to organize Columbia’s vast Maysles Films archive.

And what of the salesman? Paul Brennan was so understandably taken with himself in the film that, shortly after its release, he tried his hand at acting, before the arthritis that had plagued him throughout much of his adult life eventually led to his death.

The Mid-American Bible Company’s Hargrove Turner offered Albert, David, and Zwerin his own surprisingly magnanimous take. In a letter to Maysles Films dated January 3, 1969, Turner wrote:

Your picture, The Salesman, includes a fine character study of the kind of man who looks great to every sales manager during an interview but really shouldn’t be hired at all in the first place.

Many emotions are awakened through the fine natural presentation of your story, and whether it is Bibles or watercoolers, it becomes obvious to any sales-minded person, through your story, what a man should not feel or think in his attempt to become successful.

From an entertainment point of view, housewives should find much fun in viewing it.

Thanks to Butler Library, Columbia University, home of the Albert and David Maysles papers, 1948–2018.