Film · 1969 · Films · 1960s
Salesman
Scored from 35 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin follow four door-to-door salesmen who peddle expensive illustrated Catholic Bibles for the Mid-American Bible Company, working parish-supplied leads through working-class kitchens and living rooms around Boston and then in Opa-locka, Florida. The film centres on Paul Brennan, an aging Irish-American pitchman nicknamed 'The Badger,' whose patter is failing him while colleagues known as the Gipper, the Rabbit and the Bull keep closing. Shot in black-and-white 16mm with sync sound, it observes the doorstep pitches, the shared motel rooms and a company sales conference without narration or interviews. It is a feature-length work of American direct cinema.
Salesman (1969) is a film IMDb files under the documentary and drama genres. The runtime is 86 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Only 35 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 35 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 133 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Salesman lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 35.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
