A Variety of Hells

...With his extremely able cinematographer, Tamas Somlo, the director has devised some unusually fine compositions in long and extreme long shots, and the camera movements reach the ultimate in suggestive mobility —any more, and we would become unpleasantly conscious of them...

...I myself am inclined to believe that they are even less sympathetic than the film shows or could show—vide E. E. Cummings: "a salesman is an it that stinks . . ./ whether it's in lonjewray/ or shrouds is immaterial it stinks/ a salesman is an it that stinks to please . . ." If the salesmen were shown not only on the road but also at home...

...their boredom and boring-ness...

...Incompetent and vulgar, to be exact...

...The fact that the hotel in Boston is made into some sinister dive instead of the standard Sheraton it should have been...

...The film tries to be at once tough and sentimental, mocking and sympathetic, all of which is epitomized, perhaps inadvertently, in its advertisement...

...pornographic titillation...

...The Maysles have gone out with their equipment to capture something quaintly unwholesome yet typical...

...but also of a society plagued by superstition, idiot competitiveness, and stultifying materialism...

...Or are we laughing at both Savior and Salesman...

...Nonetheless, the basic texture of this film is superbly right: dry, sharp, harrowing without any fancy effects or histrionics...

...The acting by a Russo-Hungar-ian cast is generally satisfactory, although it hardly gets a chance to be more than poignant faces forcefully displaying themselves...

...Instead, they have come back with something Swiftian, scandalous, frightening, and heartbreaking...

...A typical Peerce touch is the opening shot of the film in which a pretty girl emerging from the country club's swimming pool loses the top of her bikini?what has this to do with the nouveau riche ambiance and theme of the film...

...On the one hand, the already sufficiently horrid, petty-bourgeois parvenu, Jewish milieu of the story is underlined and over-stressed in its horridness to the n-th degree...

...in the film, she is a horsy, ungainly creature...

...Actually, the film is an impossible conglomerate of "profound" statements about art, life and the psyche...

...I believe any righteous man, whether devout Catholic or atheist, would have to be disgusted by this...

...Nat Hentoff, while professing boundless admiration for the film-makers, expressed his conviction that the salesmen are shown here at their worst, that their essential humanity is sacrificed for dramatic effect...

...Is it possible to capture the truth of these encounters and lives when cameras and tape recorders are present, or do distortions grow like tumors...

...The neuroses and even psychoses that the salesmen and their dog, the camera, uncover are sometimes alarming...

...And though the Reds are more heroic and humane, the Whites have their decent moments, too...

...in the film, she merely chortles and acts equine...

...is cut from Arnold Shulman's allegedly ever-so-faithful script...

...Why can't it present its data as a journalistic report does on poverty, a war, or a riot—without taking sides, but not, presumably, without private opinions...

...How does the film-maker, in a situation like this, avoid having a pronounced view on the subject, and how, having such a view, can he still appear impartial...

...but Ali MacGraw exudes a pervasive authenticity that almost puts everything back into focus...

...usually they have to pay on the installment plan, although besides a few slick reproductions of famous Biblical paintings, it offers nothing that these folks' old Bibles don't provide just as well...

...to be sure, have scored a first by getting Soviet actresses to undress for the camera, but the shots are all from the rear, so that in the race for the crotch we are still well ahead of the Russians...

...ON SCREEN The Maysles Brothers' new documentary, Salesman, follows four Catholic Bible salesmen as they push the Good Book from door to door, attend sales conferences, get pep talks and threats from their sales manager, exchange satisfied or dissatisfied accounts of the day's activities in their motel bedrooms, immerse themselves in tv or the swimming pool, sleep and set out again to badger and bamboozle and, sometimes, sell...

...Even the very point of the story, Brenda's deliberate abandoning of the diaphragm where her mother will find it, gets fudged over and submerged in near-incomprehensibility...

...There is the Theological Consultant for the Bible company who, at a testimonial dinner, makes a speech that is worthy of the pen of Giinter Grass...

...Nevertheless, it is possible to argue, I imagine, that even this horrible method spreads the word of God and serves a purpose...

...Clouzot himself merely strikes one as painfully passe and even more painfully striving to be "with it...

...There are the salesmen themselves who, with the exception of the film's quasi-hero (who has since switched to the more secular selling of roofing and siding), show no qualms about the oily or jocular, butch or sanctimonious chicanery they practice...

...The answer is that a 90-minute film involves much more planning, organizing, arranging, selecting, editing ?contains much more patterning and good or bad artifice—than any straight, direct newspaper account...

...It therefore imposes on us the need to judge it as a construct, a work of art, and forthwith a new set of esthetic and moral expectations must be reckoned with...

...The issues involved are too grave to permit the Maysles Brothers to get away with statements about how they really "like" these salesmen while the advertising copy they release suggests an expose of dark doings...

...On top of which, the psychology is either rudimentary or ridiculous, the profound statements are superficial when not downright false, and the love triangle uninteresting because of the shallowness and sketchiness of its participants...

...For all its attitudes of daring, the film boggles at any number of things...

...Are we debunking religion or apotheosizing that quintessential American, the salesman...

...But why, someone will ask, can't the film remain neutral...

...But there are rotters everywhere, and horror is rampant...

...Now this may be news in Iron Curtain countries, and undoubtedly takes uncommon courage to express there, but it does not, in itself, make a good film...

...thus the bit on the telephone, when Brenda asks Neil how she will recognize him at the Boston station (" 'I'll be disguised as an orthodox Jew.' 'Me too,' she said...

...Still, almost despite itself, the film does achieve some impressively depressing revelations...

...There he was attacking inhuman police methods, and though the ostensible villains were the Rightists of long ago, it had to be clear even to the worst (or, at least, second-worst) clods that the target was equally the Leftist police state of today...

...Not made clear is the ghastly sense of guilt and belonging that subverts Brenda's seeming emancipation: the horror of the family that has not released her from its tentacles, and of her own weakness in not being able to extricate herself...

...The updating of the movie, and such things as turning Brenda into a Cliffie of the late '60s when she is clearly a Wellesleyite of the '50s, are unfortunate—they frequently dull Roth's sharpness of observation...

...Emblematic is the treatment of Harriet, Brenda's sister-in-law...

...It is a curious phenomenon that so-called courageous films are almost always made by bunglers, cowards or phonies, or all three in one...

...on the other hand, Neil and Brenda's affair is suffused with color so glowing, framed by surroundings so pastoral, that, at the very least, it seems intended to sell Doeskin toilet tissues on tv...

...Whereas in the story her conversation is subtly unnerving with its dignified banality...

...Already much discussion has been stirred up by the film: Is it an invasion of the privacy of those unhappy people whose living rooms and kitchens are assaulted by worse than salesmen?cinema-verite cameras...

...The same defects were present in The Round-up, and I wonder to what extent the fault is that of Gyula Hernadi, Jancso's collaborator on all scripts, and to what extent Jancso's own...

...This is a correct indictment, considering how superficial and unearned is the superiority of the average middle-class moviegoer...

...As in this promising Hungarian director's first film, The Round-up, there is much intensely filmic talent in evidence, but, even more than in the first film, the import, as distinct from the impact, is negligible...

...and in his discovery, Ali MacGraw, he has a very lucky find: an ex-model who, unlike most ex-models, actually is an actress...

...All these questions, I think, have their relevance, but beg the most important question...

...And so on, leapfrogging from blatancy to blatancy...

...Jancso may...

...There is some handsome color photography cunningly intermingled with black-and-white shots, and there is a stylish and fearfully contemporary milieu bristling with kinetic as well as more traditional art—in fact, Jacques Saulnier, the veteran art director, comes off as the hero of the occasion...

...What we get here is a great deal of seesawing brutality, a large number of characters insufficiently developed to involve us, and a good many loose ends and improbabilities...

...or something typically human and thus, supposedly, forgivable...

...their oafishness and pathos: their callousness and hauntedness...

...There are the Sales Manager and his wife, two figures so crude and complacent and, in his case, menacing, as to sum up in themselves the sociopolitical nightmare we live in...

...And if he succeeds in looking impartial, how can he avoid being either wishy-washy or a hypocrite...

...The sex scenes in particular become one big cute giggle, though here Richard Benjamin's otherwise more than adequate Neil is also to blame...

...or something—anything?that presented itself to their mechanically reinforced sensibilities...

...Wilfrid Sheed has rightly objected that the film does not show how the Church is involved with this activity...

...the point is that it takes two sides to tango into hell...

...It seems inconceivable to me that he could simply say: "This just happens...

...There is inchoate feeling and vestigial thought, and also, at the right moments, something touching and pitiable...

...Omitted as too disturbing for the viewer are things like Neil's and Brenda's anti-Semitism...

...The way religion is bandied about, merchandised, paid unctuous lip service to, makes the notorious dance around the Golden Calf seem, by comparison, the Spring Frolic at Miss Porter's School...

...Poor people are beleaguered by By John Simon A Variety of Hells conniving men who tell them, truthfully, that they got their names through the local church...

...In an interview in the Hungarian periodical Filmvildg, Jancso mentions that for his third and fifth films he switched to another cameraman, Janos Kende, whose reliance on natural light has given the camera a 360-degree mobility over Somlo's 180...

...The victors of the day proceed to massacre the losers...

...Social comment of a sort is provided also in Goodbye, Columbus, Larry Peerce's incompetent film version of Philip Roth's novella...

...Often they commit themselves to buying one of those hideous, expensive, gilt-edged Du Pont fabricoid plastic-and-nylon-bound Bibles that look like a cross between American Heritage and the Reader's Digest...

...Again, a hammy rear-view closeup of Neil's and Brenda's profiles nuzzling each other luminously in the narrow gap between the two dark backs of their beach chairs is actually repeated, lest we miss its cleverness...

...As for Claude Mauriac, who continues, "I want to be by myself, I am so moved," we can guess just what he was moved to...

...Noteworthy, above all, are the camera setups and movements...

...What is the symbology of this ad: Has Jesus become Willy Loman, or has Willy assumed the role of Christ...

...Both from watching the film and from hearing the Maysles talk about it, a certain moral ambiguity, a slip-periness based as much on fuzzy thinking as on wanting to have it both ways, comes to light...

...How the fluidity and ubiquit-ousness of Somlo's camera could be improved upon I have yet to see...

...Their witless-ness, especially when trying to be witty...

...the perhaps inevitable degradation of ignorance they live in, which is nevertheless an accusation and a challenge...

...but praise in such spurts is spurious and ephemeral...

...It is a graceful, nicely shaded piece of acting, enhanced by the fact that it comes from a young woman not merely lovely, but actually gifted with a kind of thinking man's loveliness...

...Their Catholicism is appealed to, questioned, played upon...

...But Peerce is fortunate in most of his performers, especially in Jack Klug-man as Patimkin...

...And now the other criticisms become meaningful...

...They have stumbled onto something much bigger than they realize: a condemnation—however fragmented, fortuitous and even inept —of the human condition, of man himself...

...In that case, the film would have to be more committed to what it shows, just as in the opposite case it would have to be much more severe...

...Whereas in the story she is just like Brenda, only bosomier...

...The most disappointing film of the moment is the reputable Henri-Georges Clouzot's La Prisonniere, which induced Claude Mauriac to write: "My throat is choked up, my heart bowled over...

...it's just there...

...This shows Jesus Christ, complete with halo, carrying two salesman's suitcases...

...that Brenda is shown from the beginning of the last scene outraged and angry, as if some Higher Morality were propelling her...

...The various characterizing references to Mary McCarthy are omitted as, presumably, too literate for the average viewer...

...I suspect that sorer truths would be revealed...

...Is it unfair to the poor, decent fellows who happen to be selling Bibles instead of Fuller brushes, and are therefore pilloried as Pharisees...

...and old-fashioned boulevard melodrama of passions...

...And, above all, there are the victims, the people...

...But at the same time, it avoids the issue: that anyone with genuine aspirations to independent thought, esthetic sensibility, the life of the spirit must feel profoundly shocked and revolted by the lives of these his fellow men, with or without benefit of Bible salesmen...

...Peerce's direction is steadily obvious, sometimes pseudopoetic, often coy...

...Andrew Sarris has criticized the film (like Hentoff, from a liberal standpoint) for generating an easy sense of superiority in the viewer...

...Miss MacGraw, and for this Peerce may deserve some directorial credit, gives a delicately balanced performance, her Brenda emerging tough and unfeeling at times, tom-boyish and silly at others, considerably yet not repellently narcissistic all along...

...and though the Whites are shown as rather more reprehensible than the Reds, the Reds are pretty sanguinary, too...

...Things happen in a straightforward, acerbic manner, and the mere posture of a man when he is being executed tells more than a mess of dialogue in a lesser film...

...but the placid benighted-ness in other houses is scarcely more comforting...

...As a last indignity, even the pornography is derivative and, instead of building up to ever greater excitement, commits the sin against the unholy ghost of petering out into romance...

...Does the editing of the film disingenuously introduce editorial comment where none is admitted to be...

...In The Red and the White we are shown some of the fighting in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, during which a certain monastery is seized now by White, now by Red conquerors, the latter reinforced by a Hungarian volunteer regiment...

...that Father and Mother Pa-timkin's letters are not reproduced in their disheartening entirety—all suggest a belated moral awakening rather than a surrender to dehumanizing conventionality...

...A strangely unrealized film is Miklos Jancs6's The Red and the White...