POLL: HUSBANDS (Cassavetes, 1970) vs. GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD (Shebib, 1970)

Hoping this poll isn't too esoteric--people have seen these films, right? Anyway, was kind of surprised to find, after finally watching Goin' Down the Road yesterday (after years of only being familiar with it via the SCTV spoof) that, hell, Ebert was right! I like Husbands a lot better than he does, but GDtR does indeed capture a lot of that Cassavetes feel minus the self indulgence that turn people off about his films (and perhaps the rambling Husbands in particular).

Also, a wealth of indelible moments: Yonge St. in the 70s, the pair of Satie-scored scenes, "might as well hang for caviar as hot dogs," and what is possibly the least glamorous wedding in movie history.

Goin' Down the Road is one of my favourite movies ever. I've been proselytizing for it for the past 30+ years. I wrote about it a couple of years ago. If you're in the States, I believe it streams on Netflix sometimes, and there's also a DVD you can buy that pairs it with the sequel Shebib directed a few years ago (which I haven't been able to bring myself to see, positive that it won't be any good).

I heaped all sorts of negativity on Cassavetes in his thread two years ago (when a big retrospective played here), so I'm going to let him rest in peace. You can certainly see his influence in Goin' Down the Road.

clem, can't access that link as I'm a stubborn Facebook holdout, but is it the same piece that's on the site that's linked on yr profile here? Terrific write up in any case.

I don't think I'd be interested in a sequel either, especially not after reading that Shabib doesn't even care for GDtR itself. I'd hate to see what he considers a corrective to his earlier film.

The DVD contains an interesting tv interview with Shebib in which he talks about (along other things) his love of Capra. Amusingly, he cites It's a Wonderful Life as not only a favourite but as one of he director's less well known films! I had assumed that the film had already begun its second life as a holiday perennial by the early 70s, but I guess not!

Same piece--thanks.

If that's an old interview, I wouldn't doubt that--that It's a Wonderful Life was rediscovered through incessant TV play through the '70s and '80s.

If seeing both films is a pre-condition of this poll, don't be surprised if it ends up either 1-1 or 2-0, depending upon how you vote. I just don't think many people outside of Canada have seen Goin' Down the Road (517 user votes on IMDB--Warhol's Empire has 414).

Seeing both films is ideal, sure, but fans (or haters) of Husbands are certainly free to use the poll as they wish. Didn't realize GDtR was that obscure--Ebert and Kael both reviewed it, after all, but then again, that was 40 years ago.

And yeah, I voted Goin' Down the Road even though I do like Husbands (albeit less than Opening Night and much less than A Woman Under the Influence)/

And hey, non-Canadians, look what I just found! Now you have no excuse!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xGObvZAN38

Wow. Twice I've linked to clips that were later removed--I'm surprised that's been up there since February. Watch it while you can...and if not, at least skip forward to 17:00 to see a woman who has haunted me since I first saw this as a teenager. The actress died just a handful of years after making this.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

You guys have 24 hours to watch Goin Down the Road via the aforelinked YouTube. Go!

Goin' Down The Road is great, but Ebert's wrong about it being better than Shadows.

But is it better than Husbands? That is the question.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Nice!

(considering that I begun expecting that clem and I would be the only ones casting votes)

no, i have not seen GDtR. There are lots of films.

A friend gave me an autographed copy (by the author, who runs a good books-into-film series here) of this yesterday:

http://thumbs3.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m9DTjTYweYwpTwoChMIXLJg.jpg

The 25 best Toronto films:

http://nowtoronto.com/movies/story.cfm?content=196074

I've never seen the top two, but I'd much rather #3 be at the top. Only seen nine altogether.

Only seen seven myself. Remember loving Last Night at the time, but haven't seen it since it was new. A few of these--I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, The Silent Partner, Take This Waltz--were already on my to-see list, and there are quite a few others I've never heard of, but which look interesting (Winter Kept Us Warm, particularly).

Simply seeing the title of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, however, is still enough to get my blood boiling.

Isn't that silly?

I saw Winter Kept Us Warm about a decade ago, some odd screening at UT. It was paired with Cronenberg's two earliest, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, I think because they were all shot on campus.

The Silent Partner is a fave of mine, a great VHS rental discovery back in the day. It's a weird mixture of ingenious westlake-esque comedy crime caper and serial killer thriller (there's one jarringly nasty scene that nobody ever seems to forget once they've watched the movie).

Love the seventies decor of the mall that's seen at the very start of Scanners - is that in Toronto?

Pretty sure it's the food court at Eaton's Centre, only a few years after it was built. Big deal at the time, basically an artifact now. (Also where The Silent Partner's shot...I think?)

The DVD contains an interesting tv interview with Shebib in which he talks about (along other things) his love of Capra. Amusingly, he cites It's a Wonderful Life as not only a favourite but as one of he director's less well known films! I had assumed that the film had already begun its second life as a holiday perennial by the early 70s, but I guess not!

odd coincidence -- cassavetes often cited capra as his all-time favorite director.

This is funny in a why-exactly? sense: Goin' Down the Road dropped from 3,113 to 5,334 on the TSPDT? list.

It's hard to imagine young people, Canadian or not, in 2023 with aspirations to work in film looking at it and saying, "this is an example of what I really want to do". Also I suppose there's a kind of "provincial embarrassment" among certain Canadian critics that something that now seems awkward to most was regarded so highly at the time.

Maybe it's common knowledge already, but just realized Donald Shebib's son is Noah "40" Shebib, exec producer behind all of Drake's music.

Wanda is probably the most similar 1970 film of some renown, but it's not hard to see why it would be better regarded now than Goin' Down the Road: a hipper existential feel, more involving backstory and a female point-of-view both before and behind the camera.

something that now seems awkward to most was regarded so highly at the time.

Personally, I don't find anything awkward about it today; I think it's as great as ever.

Anyway, my first post was more about the joke of it moving from absolutely nowhere to absolutely nowhere squared.

A friend subscribes to the Times and is allowed to share 10 pieces a month. In honor of Don Shebib's death, here's their original review from 1970. I don't really care--the piece is 53 years old, a review of a relatively obscure film, so I'm sharing it here.

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THE first thing to be said about the extraordinary new Canadian film “Goin’ Down the Road” is that it is not a “road picture” in the genre of “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” or any other slick, sentimental take‐off on the rootless life. The operative word in the title is not “road,” it's “down.” A frankly depressing, clinically realistic study of two luckless high school dropouts from Nova Scotia running afoul of life in Toronto, “Goin’ Down the Road” is both a sad little human story and a surgical exposé, all the more mordant because uncannily restrained, of social squalor.

It achieves its double status by steering a middle course between fiction and documentary with such modesty and clarity of purpose that one might almost miss noting, while absorbed in its characters and its portrayal of indigent working class life, its considerable artistic originality. This deft little movie, the first by director Don Shebib, is surely the most impressive new work of realist cinema in years.

Perhaps among the most admirable aspects of “Goin’ Down the Road's” perfection are instances of what it isn't, of clichés resisted and modish tricks eschewed. Particularly striking is Shebib's avoidance of “cinèma vérité,” the inevitable recourse of directors these days when “real life” is to be invoked. Cinéma vérité, as it happens, is often scarcely more realistic than “Gold Diggers of 1933”. Purporting to serve up reality raw and unadorned, it in variably projects a blurry, noisy dream‐world through which people galvanized by the presence of whirring cameras move like somnambulists. Shebib (like William Fruet, who wrote the no‐nonsense screenplay) was obviously interested less in aping “reality” than in shaping a work of art that reflected the reality of his vision. And that it does.

Thus the style of “Goin’ Down the Road” is high style — careful compositions, sumptuous color, crisp editing, elegantly understated camera work and a wealth of lyrical effects (for all of which give credit to cinematographer Richard Leiterman). In fact, this film, for all the grimness of its story, is “lyrical” practically from start to finish — lyrical insouciant, lyrical scenic, lyrical tawdry, lyrical sad. The effect of the continuous visual sweetness and symmetry, which draw strict attention to the things and people being photographed, is precisely opposite to that of cinéma verité's impromptu zooms and wobbles, which tend to call more attention to the unseen camera than to its visible subjects. In one of the frequent ostensible paradoxes of good art, the most disciplined artifice produces an impression of the greatest naturalness.

However, it is doubtful that even Shebib's probity could have succeeded in pulling off the intricate trick of “Goin’ Down the Road” had he not been blessed with the absolutely incredible performances of Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley as the indigents Peter and Joey. With out seeming to “act” at all, these prodigious young actors make every word and look and gesture count for something, so that each scene is packed with almost more subliminal information, about the characters and their situation, than one's brain can fairly digest. Peter and Joey are ultimately pathetic, but actors McGrath and Bradley, in the immediacy and complexity of their manner, leave no time or room for pity. They first extort interest, then anguished identification.

When Peter and Joey come to the big city in their flame painted old Chevrolet convertible, they fully expect instant success — not because life in poverty‐wracked Nova Scotia has conditioned them to it, but because the fantasy of great expectations (promulgated by Peter, sunnily entertained by Joey) is their psychic balance wheel. Any thing good that happens to them (like a princely wage of $80 a week) they exult over and take in stride; anything bad they shrug off or regard as a blessing in disguise. And what happens is mostly bad. They get miserable jobs stacking bottles, then washing cars, then no jobs at all.

Peter, fascinated by beautiful and intelligent girls, can't get to first base with them. Joey, less fastidious, dates a sweet but shallow waitress, gets her pregnant and (to Peter's despair) marries her. A feckless binge of installment‐plan buying leaves Joey broke in no time, and as winter sets in the three of them are sharing a ratty two room apartment. On Christmas Eve Peter and Joey try to steal food from a supermarket and manage to escape being caught only by badly beating a clerk. Now hunted, the two head west toward Vancouver. The End.

The focus of the drama in “Goin’ Down the Road” is Peter. Lethargic, dreamy Joey, a bemused child disguised as a man, is an obvious lost cause. But one catches in the alert, ruined cherubic features of Peter the glimmer of a marvelous idea, the idea of another, fulfilling kind of life. He harbors an ambition for happiness that recognizes no obstacles. Applying for a top job in a ritzy ad agency, he meets the personnel man's incredulous stare with a wondering gaze of his own. Faced by setbacks, he fumes and hunkers down and dreams anew.

But, fatally, he continues to see his life entwined with Joey's, even when the latter has become a dead weight, dragging him down. The glimmer flares and wanes. Late in the film — as he slouches listening to a record of Satie he bought because a girl who enthralled him had played it in a store — we see the light almost extinguished. And it is a measure of McGrath's performance that as Peter slips off into a bitter vagueness, one gets a sense of real tragedy, a dreadful human loss. A pointed image near the end suggests that Peter and Joey will probably end up as Skid Row bums.

“Goin’ Down the Road” is about degradation, about spiritual death, among people whose unfortunate pride, a reluctance to perceive themselves as victims, prevents them from doing anything to save themselves. At times in the movie one almost wants to leap through the screen and yell the blatant truth in Peter's ear, to make him shape up, get political, run away, anything. The film — in effect, a dumb movie about dumb people — offers not the slightest social or psychological perspective, in the form of an alternate point of view or way of being, on its heroes’ plight. But in the end one is astonished by the rightness of this strategy, which has less presented than forced one to live a problem. Days later, “Goin’ Down the Road” still lingers in the mind like a vivid, anxious dream.