Goin' Down the Road
Encyclopedia
Goin' Down the Road is a 1970 Canadian film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 directed by Donald Shebib
Donald Shebib
Donald Shebib , often called Don Shebib, is a Canadian film director, writer, producer and editor. He gained prominence and critical acclaim in Canadian cinema for his 1970 movie Goin' Down the Road. The company travelled around Toronto in a station wagon and was supported by CFDC funding...

 and released in 1970
1970 in film
The year 1970 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* January 9 - Larry Fine, the second member of The Three Stooges, suffers a massive stroke, therefore ending his career....

. It chronicles the lives of two men from the Maritimes
Maritimes
The Maritime provinces, also called the Maritimes or the Canadian Maritimes, is a region of Eastern Canada consisting of three provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. On the Atlantic coast, the Maritimes are a subregion of Atlantic Canada, which also includes the...

 who move to Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

 in order to find a better life. It starred Doug McGrath
Doug McGrath
Doug McGrath, born in Nova Scotia, Canada on Aug 21,1939 is a Canadian actor whose most notable role was of "Peter" in the acclaimed Canadian film Goin' Down the Road. He also played in acclaimed Canadian films Wedding in White, The Hard Part Begins and Black Christmas...

, Paul Bradley
Paul Bradley (Canadian actor)
Paul Bradley was a Canadian actor, best known for his role as Joey in the classic Canadian film Goin' Down the Road....

, Jayne Eastwood
Jayne Eastwood
Jayne Eastwood , also credited as Jane Easton or Jane Eastwood, is a Canadian actress most famous for appearing in the 2002 film Chicago. She was one of the original cast members of the Toronto branch of The Second City, and was a semi-regular on SCTV...

 and Cayle Chernin
Cayle Chernin
Cayle Vivian Chernin was a Canadian actress, writer, and producer born on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. She began her career in a small, but important, role in Donald Shebib's Canadian film Goin' Down the Road...

. Despite a lack of production expense, 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. In 2002, readers of Playback
Playback (magazine)
Playback is a Canadian film, broadcasting and interactive media website owned by Brunico Communications. In May 2010, after 24 years of publication, Playback magazine stopped publishing its biweekly print edition....

voted it the 5th greatest Canadian film of all-time.

Plot

Peter and Joey drive their 1960 Chevrolet Impala 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. The men find minimum wage
Minimum wage
A minimum wage is the lowest hourly, daily or monthly remuneration that employers may legally pay to workers. Equivalently, it is the lowest wage at which workers may sell their labour. Although minimum wage laws are in effect in a great many jurisdictions, there are differences of opinion about...

 jobs ($2 per hour for a 40 hour week) - which still pay much better than anything they could find back home.

They soon turn their good fortune into residency in 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 television start to strain his finances. He becomes desperate as his child's birth approaches and the expenses start to mount.

Disaster strikes when Peter and Joey 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 from a Loblaws
Loblaws
Loblaws is a supermarket chain with over 70 stores in Canada, headquartered in Brampton, with stores across Ontario and Quebec. Loblaws is a division of Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada's largest food distributor...

 supermarket, which inevitably results in disaster.

Cast

  • Doug McGrath
    Doug McGrath
    Doug McGrath, born in Nova Scotia, Canada on Aug 21,1939 is a Canadian actor whose most notable role was of "Peter" in the acclaimed Canadian film Goin' Down the Road. He also played in acclaimed Canadian films Wedding in White, The Hard Part Begins and Black Christmas...

     as Peter McGraw
  • Paul Bradley
    Paul Bradley (Canadian actor)
    Paul Bradley was a Canadian actor, best known for his role as Joey in the classic Canadian film Goin' Down the Road....

     as Joey Mayle
  • Jayne Eastwood
    Jayne Eastwood
    Jayne Eastwood , also credited as Jane Easton or Jane Eastwood, is a Canadian actress most famous for appearing in the 2002 film Chicago. She was one of the original cast members of the Toronto branch of The Second City, and was a semi-regular on SCTV...

     as Betty
  • Cayle-Lorraine Sinclair
    Cayle Chernin
    Cayle Vivian Chernin was a Canadian actress, writer, and producer born on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. She began her career in a small, but important, role in Donald Shebib's Canadian film Goin' Down the Road...

     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

Social relevance

The film reflected an important social phenomenon 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
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

. Although the men in the film come from Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...

, the "Newfie" as an unsophisticated manual labourer was a common stereotype starting in the early 1950s as many 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. Many of Toronto's early housing developments (particularly Regent Park
Regent Park
Regent Park is a neighbourhood located in Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Regent Park is Canada's oldest and largest social housing project; built in the late 1940s. Formerly the centre of the Cabbagetown neighbourhood, it is bounded by Gerrard Street East to the north, River Street to the east,...

) were built to handle the influx of internal immigrants before they were eventually replaced by external immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia starting in the 1960s.

The film is well known to Canadians and was parodied in an episode of SCTV
Second City Television
Second City Television is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984.- Premise :...

, with John Candy
John Candy
John Franklin Candy was a Canadian actor and comedian. He rose to fame as a member of the Toronto branch of The Second City and its related Second City Television series, and through his appearances in comedy films such as Stripes, Splash, Cool Runnings, The Great Outdoors, Spaceballs, and Uncle...

 and Joe Flaherty
Joe Flaherty
Joe Flaherty is an American-Canadian actor and comedian. He is best known for his work on the Canadian sketch comedy SCTV, from 1976 to 1984, and as Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks...

 as a Maritime lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

 and doctor
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

 (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
Andrea Martin
Andrea Louise Martin is an American and Canadian actress and comedienne. She has appeared in films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, on stage in productions such as My Favorite Year, Fiddler on the Roof and Candide, and in the television series, SCTV.-Personal life:Martin, the oldest of three...

 expanded the list of characters as a French-Canadian nuclear physicist who was also seeking better opportunities outside her native province of Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

. As in the original, the men are entranced by the big city appeal of Yonge Street
Yonge Street
Yonge Street is a major arterial route connecting the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto to Lake Simcoe, a gateway to the Upper Great Lakes. It was formerly listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest street in the world at , and the construction of Yonge Street is designated an "Event of...

, a primary commercial thoroughfare in downtown Toronto. The parody ends on a happier note, with the characters leaving Toronto to seek better opportunities in Edmonton.

Production and significance

Many of the film's sequences were improvised on the spot. For example, the scene in Allan Gardens
Allan Gardens
Allan Gardens is one of the oldest parks in Toronto, Canada. It has a conservatory , a playground and two fenced off-leash areas for dogs. It is operated by Toronto Parks who also run Centennial Park Conservatory...

 where Pete and Joey interact with some musical tramps: according to Donald Shebib, McGrath saw the men and called Shebib who hurried down with his camera and other cast members in tow. Shot on 16mm reversal stock, the near-documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 look of the movie impressed a number of critics who appreciated the film's honesty and its refusal to pander to the audience. Pete 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
The Grapes of Wrath (film)
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 drama film directed by John Ford. It was based on John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F...

but it 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
Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada
The Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada was a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage, and to facilitating access to regional and national collections through partnerships with members of Canada's audio-visual community...

, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage.

The up and coming singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn
Bruce Cockburn
Bruce Douglas Cockburn OC is a Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter. His most recent album was released in March 2011. He has written songs in styles ranging from folk to jazz-influenced rock to rock and roll.-Biography:...

 composed several songs for this film including "Goin' Down the Road" and "Another Victim of the Rainbow". Cockburn refused to 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.

Shebib subsequently directed the 1981 film Heartaches, which starred Margot Kidder
Margot Kidder
Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder is a Canadian-born American actress. She is perhaps best known for playing Lois Lane in the four Superman movies opposite Christopher Reeve, a role that brought her to widespread recognition....

 and Annie Potts
Annie Potts
Anne Hampton "Annie" Potts is an American film and television actress. She is known for her roles in the 1980s popular films such as Ghostbusters , Pretty in Pink , Jumpin' Jack Flash , Who's Harry Crumb? and Ghostbusters II . Potts is also known as a voice-actress...

 in a thematically similar story about two women.

In 2010, Shebib announced that a sequel film, Down the Road Again, is in production. In the sequel, set in the present day, Joey has died in Toronto and Pete — who left the city after becoming estranged from his friend — must return to the city to honour Joey's request that his ashes be taken back to Cape Breton Island
Cape Breton Island
Cape Breton Island is an island on the Atlantic coast of North America. It likely corresponds to the word Breton, the French demonym for Brittany....

. According to Jayne Eastwood, Cayle Chernin delayed cancer treatments to work on Down the Road Again, which is expected to be released in 2011. Chernin died on February 18, 2011.
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