Word: goins
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...GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD makes an honest attempt at portraying the malaise of two working-class individuals. Unfortunately, filmmaker Don Shebib seems to have had little on his mind except his low-budget, and little to communicate but a warm feeling towards his Canadian environs. He has carried dramatic restraint to a fault, earnestness to dullness. He has, in short, made what Peter Schiedabl called "a dumb film about dumb people"; but where that reviewer could still praise the film for capturing the texture of a hand-to-mouth existence, I cannot. Shebib simply hasn't made it interesting...
...novel where the unthinking masses are hauled off to a sheep-like death. On the verge of starvation (and Christmas) Peter and Joey rob a grocery store, bashing in the skull of a clerk who tries to stop them. At film's end they are in flight: once again goin' down the road, probably to another half-year of good times, hard knocks, tedium, and a folk guitar strumming on the soundtrack...
...forced himself through a crash training program: "Up at five, to bed by ten at night. No lunch, no breakfast, my stomach burnin' with hunger, fightin' temptation, women of all races callin' me on the phone, and the only thing keepin' me from goin' out the window is thinkin' of that short walk to the ring, and all those faces there, lookin' at me and sayin': 'Why it's a miracle! He looks sooo beautiful.' " He did, weighing in last week at a rock-hard...
Like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces before it, Goin' Down the Road is one of the new "road" films in which a stretch of asphalt provides the metaphoric core. Pete (Doug McGrath) and his pal Joey (Paul Bradley) are two wistful roustabouts from the Canadian Maritime Provinces. With 30 bucks and an abused Chevrolet labeled "My Nova Scotia Home," they pick up and head for Toronto...
...spirit. Goin' Down the Road is closer to the intimacies of Marty than to the paranoid swagger of Easy Rider. It is weakest when its score laments "just another victim of the rainbow." It is persuasive and forceful when it studies the social pathology of urban outpatients, men who chivy and moon, boasting of the rural splendors that they once fled, dreaming of the Big Strike, and buying color television sets on time...