PAUL BRENNAN IN SALESMAN

The Maysles' debut feature is a devastating and fluid image of the American dream

SALESMAN (1968). Albert, the longer lived of the great documentarians, the Maysles (pronounced "MAY-zuls") brothers (David, the younger brother, died in his fifties in 1987) said in the Criterion Collection edition apropos of this, their classic first feature, Salesman: "I've always had a kind of almost religious excitement about the fact that you can really record reality with a great deal of exactitude, as long as you don't carry with you the baggage of prejudgment, of preconception. You have to throw all that stuff aside, and depict with an open mind what you as an artist with a camera find interesting. It isn't just a fly on the wall. It has to be a camera with love. It has to be a camera with empathy." He says this with an Irish-tinged Boston accent, very like the accents of the subjects of the film, their debut feature.

The grainy black and white film has an immaculate and classic look. It is free of narration or commentary or interviews, the sound and image seamless, all recorded with perfect access only by Albert using a camera he had built and David using a a separate synchronized Nagra for the sound, a method that allowed them to work more seamlessly and in longer stretches before the days of digital. They called it "cinema direct," or Direct Cinema, and didn't like the word "vérité," finding it pretentious and alien to their own humble Boston origins.

The Willy Loman, Eugene O'Neill grimness of the life of these men on the road selling Catholic Bibles to poor people in Opa-locka, a town outside Miami, is palpable. But the essential thing to know is that the Maysles brothers feel close to this world and affectionate toward these men. They themselves were Jewish, but they came from the same lower middle class part of Boston as these Irish Catholic salesmen. The joke was, as told by Paul Brennan in his fake Irish brogue, that the Irish were supposed to have civil service jobs, and the Jews should have been the salesmen, but the filmmakers' father was a postal clerk, and these poorly educated Irish guys were out selling, a job they weren't, or at least Paul Brennan, despite his years of experience, wasn't suited for. Salesman is stunning and true because it is a labor of love. And, of course, it is beautifully edited and given a structure by Ellen Gifford and Charlotte Zwerin. In the end it is a story of American falsehood and the American dream, lives on the edge lived by lower class people (Albert Maysles' term). "It's a film," Albert says in the Criterion commentary, "that questions the very core of capitalism, of our belief in the individual." And it was too strong in its simple truth-telling: it took them twenty-five years to get it shown on television. It has taken some of us longer than that to be ready to look at it.

Salesman's surface simplicity and focus, its clean, uncluttered, grainy, 16mm., black and white images, give it, in retrospect, a kind of searing, diamond-bright perfection. It's not an easy film to watch, but nothing impure, didactic, or ironic appears in the picture it provides, the Maysles' first great picture of what Direct Cinema meant in their hands. The film depicts nothing extermal to these four Irish Catholic Bible salesmen in Chicago and Florida one winter in 1966. The first essential is the smooth, light method of working Albert and David had developed, their confidernt, friendly ability to walk into a house the salesmen visited or linger in their motel room, filming virtually unnoticed. It took skill and empathy. You either have it or you don't. The second essential is the men's own willingness to be filmed, without acting. Or at least without seeming to. After the film was made, Paul Brennan said to someone he was an "actor," perhaps wishful thinking, but it had a bad effect: it led to Pauline Kael's calling all this a lie and claiming the Maysles had hired roofing salesmen to pose as Bible salesmen. (In the event, Penelope Gilliatt wrote the favorable New Yorker review praising its humor and elegance.)

It was not planned or anticipated, but the salesman of the four whom the Maysles chose to concentrate on, Paul Brennan, turned out to be having a grim time indeed. In Florida Paul spends two weeks unable to come up with a single sale. And of the four he was the one who tended to take dry periods particularly hard. We see that his own attitude is bringing him down, when the other three perform better with less effort; but there is no need to point to this, it's just there.

The men live in the simple motels of the time, which look pathetic today. They smoke a lot, to a contemporary American eye suicidally much, or at least to a degree you'd think would turn off the customers. But such things went unnoticed then. They wear dark suits, short sleeved white shorts and thin black ties, go periodically to company meetings where they're threatened and cajoled and hear men tall lies about their successes that can only be depressing to those, like Paul, who know first hand the truth is otherwise.

As the Maysles saw, and Albert's commentary underlines, there is no real togetherness among the men. They had worked together for years. They had pet names for each other, making them like cartoon characters: the Rabbit, the Gipper, the Bull; and Paul was the Badger. But in these barren circumstances, there little room for real camaraderie. The epithets seem to distance them. They prey off their poor clients and they compete with each other.

The film looks extraordinary now. Some then were impressed by it, but others were put off. The truth it shows is too hard to bear. The church gave parishioners something to fill out, expressing an interest. The company was in touch with the Catholic Church, perhaps. So to get a foot in the door, the salesmen say "We're from the church." But they are not from the church. And they are selling almost exclusively to people who can't afford it -- because richer people don't fall for Bible salesmen. This also makes Paul Brennan more angry, because he is struggling with those who say they haven't the money, and it's true.

Albert Maysles recounts that they showed the film to groups of potential buyers. From one group all walked out before the film was over. One woman remained, and when he looked, she was crying. She was the woman who was to become his wife.

Salesman, 85 mins., was edited by regular collaborator Charlotte Zwerin, along with Ellen Giffoard and Barbara Jarvis. Sound recorded by David Maysles, cameraman Albert Maysles. Sound mixer Dick Vorosek. Screened for this review on the Criterion Collection film (for a more explicit spelling out of the themes see the Criterion essay by Toby Miller), for the Albert Maysles Memorial Film Festival May 8 - 14, 2015 at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco. See my preview coverage on Filmleaf.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.