Word: salesman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only a one-joke film, salesman, like so much of direct cinema, is a one-short film. Now while we have no right, given the style and the technical different relationships, there is no excuse for spending half of our viewing time in close-medium one0short, mainly contemplating Paul Brennan's dejected visage. The best documentary camera work (Ricky Leacock, sometimes) is distinguished by its description of the whole in the detail, the capturing on hands in Leacock's Mothers day, for instance). Salsman, despite almost mythic possibilities (an existence trapped in motels with their cleaning women; ion rented cars...
...SALESMAN, by Alvert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, is in the direct cinema style. Its structure. Characteristically, is determined by following the subject-in this case a door-to-door Bible salesman (Paul Brennan) -with sound recorder and camera. The film opens with Brennan and his three selling teammates in Chicago, and the rest of the film takes place in Florida, where Brennan and his buddies are opening new territory. Under direct hortatory pressure from is sales manager and psychological pressure form his less than sympathetic competitors, the elderly Brennan finds himself unable from his increasingly pathetic reactions...
Critics who are lauding this as an indifferently lighted Death of a Salesman are missing the point. (Besides, if it's a death, it's a movie death. A central duplicity is being practiced here-a duplicity which violently, perhaps fatally, transgresses principles of minimum interference. How likely is it that a man whose drag a film crew wit him from house to house, despite tapering sales?) This isn't any salesman; it is a Bible salesman. The choice is not that arbitrary. The world of commerce has sucked up religious life; Christ's passion is another pitch in American...
...about the nature of a commence-ransacked religion; about the everyday violence perpetrated by modern-day moneychangers of the cloth, about a ruling class' interest in the institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti's insipid " Christ Climbed Down" ("from his bare tree/this year/and ran away to where /no intrepid Bible salesman/covered the territory/in two-tone cadillacs...
...thought I told you never to come here," barks the man at his mistress. The line is a cliche, but then so is the situation. A British salesman, Steve Howard (Rod Steiger), picks up a snippy, nubile hitchhiker named Ella (Judy Geeson). In a little black notebook, Ella has been rating her loves the way a teacher marks her pupils. After a night in a Birmingham hotel, she grants the salesman an A minus, a mark that prompts him to give his wife...