Salesman, a film as exploitative as the practices it tries to expose, continues to sell audiences on that which looks like penetrating social commentary, but which is nothing more than anti-social non-commentary on a subject too far from our hearts to bring tears to our eyes….

[The] only truly engrossing moment in Salesman is the one time that a conscious "dramatization" does take place, when the salesmen and their supervisor are "acting out" a hypothetical sales situation for self-instructive purposes. Here the supervisor plays the salesman, the salesmen play resistive clients, and men are engaged in the practices of their profession. Brennan and his associates are most interesting, most animated, when they are not themselves, and unintentionally this segment of the film makes as strong a case against Cinema Verité and its untarnished reality as I have seen….

If the grainy images and noisy soundtrack of Salesman are...