Theme Song: There were some original songs, but I was so deflated by the end, I could not bear to go back and rewatch any of this movie to extract the audio.
Interesting Dated References: Things that are hard about being a door-to-door salesman, such as driving, dealing with people door-to-door, being broke, driving to then go door-to-door to deal with people while being broke, etc.
Social Context: Arliss Howard definitely has a spotty filmography early on in his career. This film is one of those.
Summary: Door To Door follows Leon (Howard, Plain Clothes), a rookie vacuum cleaner salesman as he learns the ropes of life on the road from veteran salesman Larry (Ron Leibman).
Sounds fun, but Door To Door is essentially a bunch of slapstick skits as the two bumble their way from customer to customer. This includes absolutely stupid shit like driving a car into a pond and scamming confused rich women into buying multiple vacuum cleaners.
The entire time, the duo are being chased by some detective because it turns out Larry isn’t even employed by the vacuum company, and is actually a scam artist. To further throw this movie down the toilet, there’s a meandering romantic subplot between Leon and a woman he meets, Katherine, played by Jane Kaczmarek.
Then the owner of the vacuum company shows up and offers Larry a job because he has the highest number of sales. It is never clarified how Larry was getting the vacuum cleaners in the first place, and I don’t care because this movie brought nothing to the table and I tried and tried with it.
Worth Mentioning:
– It’s not that this movie is grueling, it just plods along, and the moments of humor are too few and far between, especially for a buddy/road trip premise.
Poster and Box Art: Door To Door features a well-illustrated cover, but I can’t find an artist’s credit anywhere.
Sounds like this flick certainly sucks
Sounds like this flick certainly sucks