I watched the film Salesman by near complete chance. When I began watching it, the only information I had was its title and the year of its release, 1969. I was not aware, even, that it was a documentary. I was not alive in 1969, nor for a couple of decades thereafter. That fact makes the film’s subject completely alien to me, an utterly captivating alien.

I began watching the film, obviously soon discovering it was a documentary. If you yourself didn’t already know, it’s a documentary about door-to-door bible salesman operating mostly in underprivileged neighbourhoods throughout New England.

I don’t hold to any rule about watching a film all the way through, even if I don’t like it. Life’s too short. But even though, on paper, the film is no thrill, I never once considered stopping it.

What the film is, on paper, is a kind of langorous documentation of the salesmen ringing doorbells, sometimes getting rejected from the first, sometimes being afforded the opportunity of a threshold conversation, and sometimes making it into family sitting rooms and doing their best at a pitch. On paper, too, the film is a documentation of the banalities of managerial speeches about sale quotas, the dry back-and-forth between salesmen of their recent rates of success, and what their down-time looks like in cheap motel rooms as they have calls home to wives or innocently goof about.

Again, on paper, it doesn’t sound the most interesting film to watch. There’s also no filmic adornment of any kind. The directors (Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin) are nowhere to be scene or heard. The camera simply observes.

The absence of stylistic intrusion reveals a truly poignant and unexpected depth to this phenomenon.

The films profundity derives from the confluence of two narratives excavating to the cultural and moral core of Middle America.

On the one hand, there is the story of the sordid attempt to sell families a bible they probably can’t afford. They’re not selling the kind of mass-market KJV that any of the salesmen’s prey could buy for nearly nothing almost anywhere. No, the product on offer is a large, hardbound bible replete with illustration.

What makes the pitch really sordid is that the salesmen, with little subterfuge, always leverage the deal with the weight of morality. The pitch is delivered scores of times, but the central value offering is that having this beautiful bible in your home will make you and your family both feel and appear more virtuous than you do right now.

The pitch has some other adornments, such as that this bible will nourish or educate the children, or that its quality will ensure it remains a generational heirloom.

Then there are the grim tactics, such as offering to put families on payment plans. The salesman work on weekdays during business hours, and in 1969, that often leaves women at home, vulnerable to these baptised bandits.

To top the interest of these grim scenes, it must be said that the salesmen commonly possess an uncommon verbal dexterity and true verve. They’re showmen of the highest order.

The story of the sale is fantastic viewing enough, but its resonance is dramatically intensified when interwoven with the documentary’s second story. It’s the story that these salesmen are themselves struggling, not just door to door, but day to day and week to week. Having to forego any scruples to make ends meet produces a kind of pathos that is truly remarkable as a day or a week goes by without a sale, and most particularly if they got a few bites and the fish swam away with the bait. Those innocuous motel scenes and dull calls home are elevated to elements of a tragic plot, but one void of any catharsis.

This is a truly remarkable film that ought to be relished.