Paul Brennan was a Bible salesman, not an actor, and the one film that matters is a documentary in which he plays himself. It is enough. Few performers have shown so plainly what it looks like when a man's gift stops working.
Fi1m perspective
A Boston kitchen, winter, 1969. A woman is trying to say no and Paul Brennan will not let her, and every time she gets near the word he is already past it, in an Irish brogue that treats her objection as a detail he can tidy up. We laughed at the patter, then stopped, because he could hear it failing before we could, and a salesman who can hear that is not a comic figure for long. Albert Maysles stays in the corner of the kitchen with his camera and waits. Brennan does the rest.
There is no career to trace, and it would be dishonest to pretend one. He sold large illustrated Bibles door to door for the Mid-American Bible Company through the 1960s, in New England and in Florida, and the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin filmed him doing it for Salesman (1969). Afterwards he took a handful of small acting parts, among them a stepfather in Below the Belt (1980), which we have not reviewed and will not judge. He died in 1990. That is the whole of it, and it is more than most working actors leave behind.
What he does in Salesman is be two men. In the motel at night he is the entertainer, doing voices and needling the others, the man who was nicknamed 'The Badger' for pestering rather than charming. On the doorstep he is somebody else, listening to his own lines come out and land on nothing. The film sends him from Boston to a sales meeting in Chicago, where a man on a platform explains that the Bible is a product with a market like any other, and on to Florida, where the doors are no easier. David Maysles and Zwerin build his decline from glances and sales totals, and they let a shot of him singing to himself in the car between calls run until it stops being funny. That is editing, but it is also him: he gives them a face that changes.
We should say the obvious thing, which is that a salesman performs for a living and Brennan knew there was a camera in the kitchen. The film is not quite as invisible as it pretends, and neither is he. It does not matter. Charles McDevitt, James Baker and Raymond Martos are in the same rooms with the same product and the same camera, and the film comes away with one character and a half, and the one is Brennan. Watch Salesman for him. There is nothing else to watch him in, and there does not need to be.
Biography
Paul Brennan (1913–1990) was an American actor and salesman. He appeared as himself, nicknamed 'The Badger', in the 1969 direct cinema documentary Salesman, directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, which follows four Bible salesmen working for the Mid-American Bible Company.
Brennan had earlier worked as a door-to-door Bible salesman. He later took small acting roles in fiction films, including Maguire in Hennessy (1975) and the stepfather in Below the Belt (1980). He died in Mattapan, Boston, Massachusetts.
