Old movies: Salesman

This 1968 documentary about four Bible salesmen from the Boston area explores the lonely and often uncomfortable world of the door-to-door salesman. We don’t see them much anymore, but in the 1960s, the nice man in shirtsleeves selling Bibles apparently was a welcome enough guest in the homes of Americans. The Maysles brothers, who made this movie and comprised its entire film crew, found the four salesmen near their Boston-area hometown.

Photo credit: DVD Times

The movie is entirely devoid of commentary or any kind of judgment or way of putting what’s onscreen into perspective. But the message is clear. These salesmen live a lonely life. When they come home at the end of a day of trying — usually unsuccessfully — to sell their expensive Bibles to Catholic families without much money, they go through the painful exercise of comparing sales with each other. Toward the end of the movie, when one of the salesmen, Paul, has had a very dry run, he is told by one of the other guys that he just needs to change his attitude.

When the salesmen are at a conference, one ambitious (or perhaps just boastful) guy stands up and says he’ll sell $35,000 worth of bibles a year because he has kids and his wife wants a bigger house. Another guy gets up and says he’ll sell $50,000 worth. You can feel our four characters’ guts wrench. Mine did, at least.

As one of the Maysles brothers say in their interview, the pursuit of money is a lonely process. “I think it’s depressing too anytime that you view people in a social situation, in a convention, where they’re really not that much together. Any kind of selling activity does not really bring people together..The film is about alienation. The salesman goes on his own lonely way from one little igloo to another, from one household to another–it’s as lonely and as difficult an existence as it is for an eskimo in the cold North. And it is the cold North because, unless he sells, he’s got no bread and butter.”

The other brother: “It’s always depressing…if your motivation in life is making money.”

The interview itself is worth watching, because the Maysles brothers answer questions like whether they render moral judgments on the four characters in the film. It is clear at least that the salesmen are nice enough guys trying to make money by selling people who don’t have money for something they don’t need. They’re not so unlike sales people today, except that it is seldom any of them knock on doors.