Goin' Down the Road
Goin' Down the Road is a Canadian-made film, released in 1970. 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-Lorraine Sinclair. Despite its obvious lack of production values, it is generally regarded as one of the best and influential Canadian films of all time, and has received considerable critical acclaim for its true-to-life performances.
Peter (McGraw) and Joey (Bradley) 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 persues 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, hotdogging it at work, get involved in a fork-lift accident by driving it although they are not qualified to do so. They lose their jobs 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.
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 sterotype starting in the early 1950s as many displaced Maritimers 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.
Importance to Canadian filmmaking
The near-documentary look of the movie impressed a number of critics, who appreciated the film's honesty and it's 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.
Unfortunately, the film may represent the zenith of English-Canadian filmmaking, as arcane Canadian content rules and favourable tax treatment of box office failures resulted in a great deal of Canadian film that was simply unwatchable.
However, French-Canadian cinema also was influenced by the realistic look of Goin' Down The Road and many successful French-Canadian 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).
External links
Categories: 1970 films