Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Ameriatch One of the best films i have seen

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Pierre Radulescu An almost hallucinatory piece of cinéma vérité that needs a second watch to get its message and everything. And that is because Salesman is subtly but unbearably depressing. A quiet desperation is pervasive throughout the movie, almost at a subliminal level. A group of four door to door salesmen is followed in their daily business. A business implying a network of bosses, salesmen, prospects. A network where nobody's innocent: the prospects struggle to find reasons to reject the offer, the salesmen push relentlessly to perfect the sales, the bosses press the salesmen to get results. And all this takes place in the Catholic universe: they try to sell expensive Catholic editions of the Bible to lower income families of Catholic parishioners. Spirituality and business interlaced, or rather business pushing aside spirituality. Under the spiritual skin a Darwinian struggle, where the weak ones are eliminated: aging parishioners cannot find any more the energy to reject the offers, aging salesmen cannot find the energy to place their Bibles any more. One of the salesmen, the eldest of them, is on the brink of loosing the battle: for those who fail the American Dream shows its nightmarish truth.Paradoxically this depressing movie carries also something like a charm: a time capsule bringing the today's viewer back to a bygone era, the wonderful 1960's, when we were so young, ladies were wearing their curlers with genuineness and gentlemen were playing cards with open pleasure, sales were made door to door, the Internet wasn't yet born, you talked with your sweetie via a phone operator, people were not afraid to invite strangers inside the house, faith was still a thing people cared about, the convertibles were so big and Gosh, so vintage! And everybody smoked, everybody, all the time! You can guess I watched it twice.

dougdoepke The camera follows four Bible salesmen as they follow up on names of Catholic parishioners in Boston and then Florida.I can understand that the documentary is not for all tastes. There's really no narrative, while we know next to nothing about the four principals. Yet, the results, to me at least, are fascinating, if not entertaining. The four Bible salesmen are a harried crew, near the bottom of a commercial food chain. Pressure to sell goes from ownership to management to salesmen, and finally to prospective customers to buy. And throughout, the camera never wavers, at times lingering over a face in rather enigmatic fashion. Nor do the subjects ever acknowledge camera's presence-- quite a cinematic accomplishment. Importantly, these are ordinary faces, certainly not the Hollywood variety.To me, the most interesting part are the working class customers. They can barely pay the bills they already have, let alone fork over an extra dollar a week. I'm guessing Badger's burnout comes from years of hustling people who should not be hustled. Of course, the pitch revolves around having a Bible with illustrations that will confirm a Catholic's faith and enrich their lives. I'm supposing the salesmen have to believe that at some level, otherwise how could they continue to pressure poor people to buy. And catch the ride by the ritzy Miami Beach hotels, right before the guys start knocking on wear-worn doors.Overall, this is quite a remarkable 85-minutes, like nothing else I've seen. I'm not sure what to make of the result, that is, whether there's an intended point beyond the momentary. But either way, the unvarnished glimpses the film provides are definitely memorable.

tonyinjapan Every time I see a documentary I wonder about the editing process - the choice of what we were *allowed* to see, and the order in which we are permitted to see it. I have the same feeling with "Salesman", but in this case it's what we get to hear. At times it seems like the audio has beenpost-recorded, rather than what was spoken on the spot. It may have had something to do with the sound recording equipment that they were using, but some dialogue clearly does not have the same acoustic quality as other piece of dialogue in the same scene. While most of the dialogue is influenced by the environments in which the participants speak (home, on the road, motel room), some dialogue sounds like it was produced in a neutral environment, like a studio.Point in case is when Paul is dissecting the day in his motel room with his roommate (19 minutes in). Paul steps into the bathroom and his speaking continues. However, given that he was most likely going to the bathroom to relieve himself, we get a dialogue free of bathroom noise, and one that was most likely re-recorded at another time in another location (this might have been so that people's 1969 sensibilities weren't offended). Now, this is clearly a manipulation of reality, which distracts from the 'real' nature of documentary - and, of course, documentaries are what the documentarians allow us to see/hear. This is not intended to devalue the movie for me , but it does serve as a reminder that documentaries are not as 'real' as many believe them to be.In any respect, I'd love to know what became of these guys. I watched a version of Salesman without any such information. Does anybody know?

MisterWhiplash Albert and David Maysles, apparently working from a personal source (the four men, nicknamed the Gipper, the Rabbit, the Bull, and the quasi-lead being the Badger, all come from or around the Irish-Boston section that the Maysles came from as well), found themselves a kind of theatrical core to what is, in terms of the actual shooting, about as straight-on as can be in documentary cinema. Al Maysles, especially, would make the bulk of his work in the future just like this- shooting with just him on camera and a sound-guy (in this case David)- and it has the feel of being right there and up front in the situations. What the Maysles called "direct-cinema", as opposed to the term Cinema Verite. It's not exactly a news program, but it's not your run-of-the-mill documentary either. While the brothers put their subjective view on the material by, of course, choosing what not to show (who knows if the men made more sales than were actually shown, or if there were more quiet moments or conversations in the motel rooms that rambled further), and in the editing process of who to cut to or what to close-in or back away from, it feels always fresh in perspective.We're really right there seeing what is going on during the sale, as well as seeing how the men "unwind" by complaining about the sales they didn't make, the things that kept them from what they had to do, which was put forward the "#1 bestselling book in the world" for 49.99 a month to your average Joe or Mrs. Joe down the street. What the Maysles don't ask is to make you really put a very harsh judgment either way; by both sides presented, of the men in the desperate but completely professional and slick act of selling (selling themselves probably just as much as the bible, and how getting the sale or not suddenly changes them in front of the prospective customer), and how they are behind closed doors, shooting the s***, playing cards, or driving in their cars. Most especially fascinating, however, is that the Maysles put a theatrical ring to the proceedings, like watching characters from a stage play ala O'Neill in the great drama of life- characters, by the way, who can be talked about just as real people as figures in a film.Seeing Salesman gives a glimpse not so much into religion- they're not sermonizing here, the Maysles- but into a specific world that doesn't exist the way it used to, where men followed along leads from previous sellers, and sometimes made it through the door or not at all. There's a disarming quality to the production; we should think that these guys aren't the ones to like or identify with, that we're the ones getting peddled to and made to feel like we MUST get this or else and so on. By opening it up just by a glimpse, and how the 16mm camera goes around with the freedom of the fly-on-the-wall, it opens up the perspective. It's one of the Maysles's very best, a piece of true Americana as a time capsule.