Trailer Tuesday: Salesman (1969)


[Video Link] Who needs Glengarry Glen Ross when you can watch the Maysles Brothers' fantastic 1969 documentary about door-to-door Catholic Bible salesmen and their impoverished, reluctant, guilt-racked customers?

Vincent Canby, film critic for The New York Times, wrote, "It's such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can't imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what's called cinema vérité or direct cinema… It is fact, photographed and recorded with extraordinarily mobile camera and sound equipment, and then edited and carefully shaped into a kind of cinematic mural of faces, words, motel rooms, parlors, kitchens, streets, television images, radio music — even weather."

The entire documentary is on YouTube.