The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 8-14
Goin’ Down the Road (1970)
Directed by Donald Shebib
This classic Canadian independent work focuses on two men (played by Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley) who migrate from their home on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia to Toronto in search of job opportunities. They struggle mightily throughout a street-level-shot film filled with tough love for them and their newfound partners (played by Jayne Eastwood and Cayle Chernin), all of whom fight through working-class drear with an unceasing hope for finding better lives.
“I made Goin’ Down the Road as my first feature film,” says Shebib. “Up to that point I had made eighteen films, mostly docs, but they were not like the usual doc films, which are far closer to Eyewitness News and 60 Minutes than to real films. My docs were far more cinematic and poetic, and so for me the step from documentaries to film drama was tiny.
“My parents are both from the Maritime provinces of Canada (I am 3rd-generation Lebanese and 7th-generation Irish), and I was aware of the journey that many Maritimers were taking to Toronto. I saw the parallels between the Newfies and the Oakies in The Grapes of Wrath—it is a standard story told all over the world of Country Mouse-City Mouse. And I had a cousin who had made the journey to the big city, then come back home defeated, so there were personal connections as well.
“I was very lucky in getting two extraordinary actors to play the lead characters of Pete and Joey. Without their performances, the film probably would have failed and been forgotten. I was also lucky to find a good screenwriter in Bill Fruet, and smart enough to recognize his talent.
“The success of the film was a huge surprise to me. People asked me for years to make a sequel, but I balked at the idea until it became clear to me that this was a film that could get support from film agencies and powers-that-be to be made. So I started to write the script, and it fell into place very easily. The film Down the Road Again was made in 2011, forty years after the original, with three of the four original starring cast members in place. (Paul Bradley had passed away several years prior, so the film begins with Joey’s death.) Down the Road Again and Goin’ Down the Road feed off of each other, and each makes the other a better film. Down the Road Again is not as ‘unusual’ of a film as Goin’ Down the Road is, but it is better realized and more emotionally satisfying.” Aaron Cutler (March 9, 7pm; March 11, 9pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “1970s Canadian Independents”)