Goin' Down the Road
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| Goin' Down the Road | |
|---|---|
 Promotional movie poster for the film |
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| Directed by | Donald Shebib |
| Produced by | Donald Shebib |
| Written by | William Fruet Donald Shebib |
| Starring | Doug McGrath Paul Bradley Jayne Eastwood Cayle Chernin |
| Music by | Bruce Cockburn |
| Cinematography | Richard Leiterman |
| Editing by | Donald Shebib |
| Distributed by | Chevron Pictures |
| Release date(s) |  July 2, 1970 October 19 February 3, 1972 September 11 |
| Running time | 90 min. |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Budget | CAD 87,000 (estimate) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Goin' Down the Road is a Canadian-made film, released in 1970 and directed by Donald Shebib. It chronicles the lives of two men from the Maritimes who move to Toronto in order to find a better life. It starred Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley, Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin. Despite its obvious lack of production values, it is generally regarded as one of the best and most influential Canadian films of all time, and has received considerable critical acclaim for its true-to-life performances.
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[edit] Plot
Peter and Joey drive from their home in the Maritimes to Toronto with the hope of meeting up with their relatives in the city who can find them a job. However, their relatives hide from what they perceive to be their uncouth behaviour, and they are set adrift in the city. They find minimum wage jobs, which still pay much better than anything they could find back home - $2 per hour for a 40 hour week.
They soon turn their good fortune into residency of a small apartment. Both men start romances, and Joey decides to get married when he gets his girlfriend (Eastwood) pregnant. He pursues a lifestyle undreamt of at home with his new wife, but the larger apartment and payments on his new stereo and TV start to strain his finances. He starts to get desperate as his child's birth approaches and the expenses start to mount.
Disaster strikes when the two get laid off at the end of the summer. Unable to find steady work and having bills to pay and a baby on the way, they come up with a harebrained scheme to rob groceries that naturally results in disaster.
[edit] Cast
- Doug McGrath as Peter McGraw
- Paul Bradley as Joey Mayle
- Jayne Eastwood as Betty
- Cayle-Lorraine Sinclair as Selina
- Nicole Morin as Nicole
- Pierre La Roche as Frenchie La Roche
- Don Steinhouse as Plant Co-worker
- Ted Sugar as Plant Co-worker
- Ron Martin as Plant Co-worker
[edit] Social Importance
The film expressed an important social phenomena in post-war Canada as the economy of the eastern provinces stagnated and many young men sought opportunities in the fast growing economy of Ontario. Although the men in the film come from Nova Scotia, the "Newfie" as an unsophisticated manual labourer was a common stereotype starting in the early 1950s as many displaced Atlantic Canadians moved to the cities looking for work, only to find widespread unemployment and jobs that may have seemed to have attractive salaries, but made living in large cities marginal at best. Most of Toronto's early housing developments (particularly Regent Park) were built to handle the influx of large number of internal immigrants before they were eventually replaced by external immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia starting in the 1960s. Even in the 21st century, the stagnation of population in the eastern provinces can be traced to internal emigration to the west, although now Alberta and British Columbia are as attractive a destination as Toronto, and the emigrants tend to be better educated.
The film is well known to Canadians and was parodied on SCTV, with John Candy and Joe Flaherty as a Maritime lawyer and doctor (respectively) seeking a better life in Toronto after hearing about the job openings there. Eastwood reprised her role as the pregnant girlfriend, and Andrea Martin expanded the list of characters as a French-Canadian nuclear physicist who was also seeking better opportunities outside her native province of Quebec. As in the original, the men are entranced by the big city appeal of Yonge Street, Toronto's primary commercial thoroughfare. The parody ends on a happier note, with the characters leaving Toronto to seek better opportunities in Edmonton.
[edit] Importance to Canadian filmmaking
The near-documentary look of the movie impressed a number of critics, who appreciated the film's honesty and its failure to pander to the audience. Doug and Joey are not depicted as being punished for a moral failure, and there is no happy ending. The film builds on such works as The Grapes of Wrath, but puts the story into the present, and the story itself is not dated - the flight from rural to urban areas continues throughout the world today.
Quebec cinema also was influenced by the realistic look of Goin' Down the Road, and many successful Quebec films based on real life experiences were also critical and often commercial successes. Other Canadian filmmakers have also taken advantage of the cost savings that realism can mean to a production (such as shooting on less expensive film stock).
This film has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage. [1]
[edit] Trivia
The car that Doug and Joey drive is a 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible.
The supermarket that Doug and Joey rob is a Loblaws.
Bruce Cockburn composed several songs for this film including "Goin' Down The Road" and "Another Victim of the Rainbow". Cockburn would refuse to ever release the songs commercially as they did not reflect his experience, but those of the characters in the film. Director Donald Shebib was introduced to Cockburn, who was then playing in coffee houses in Toronto, by journalist Alison Gordon.
The film was shot on 16mm reversal stock
Many of the sequences were completely improvised on the spot--the scene in Allan Gardens where Doug and Joey interact with some musical tramps being an example; according to Donald Shebib, McGrath saw this and called Shebib who hurried down with his camera and other cast members in tow.
