Word: shebib
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...TIMES, Shebib timorously approaches the ideas defining his characters' conditions. Peter, hungry for a place in society beyond his education and cultural reach, has been brainwashed by the Polyanna media. Joey is sucked into high-powered consumerism. Both are removed from any contact with the upper classes. Truly saddening are the attempts Peter makes to talk with a Satan-enthralled ingenue in a record shop, and a coed of more super-ficial pretensions reading Hesse in a park. He is, in both cases, peremptorily cut off. It is probably a symptom of general urban paranoia that this action seems almost...
...Shebib's characters do not have the depth to recognize a need for values alternative to the status quo. Only once does Peter drunkenly mumble something about wanting to work with his hands to create something. For the most part, Peter and Joey are content to make the most of a bad job. And Shebib is content to keep his commentary on the surface of a story that doesn't go anywhere...
...that film was a crooked union (read in Kazan's anti-communism) and the force of good a priest (read in the moral order of liberal America); at least Terry Mullow was a full human being who had a culture of his own and thought about his life. If Shebib's point is that the working-class has become so mechanized that human values have been rooted out of it, he has not shown that socializing process...
...Shebib came off very well at a Sack-sponsored press conference, obviously still flushed with his victories in the Canadian Film Awards and a good set of New York notices. But he seemed far from the great white hope of North American Cinema, even if he has brought in his first film for $82,000 at the age of 32. When pressed, he expressed some concern for the economic restructuring of the film industry itself. But he did not feel that he or his films should propose alternatives. His attitudes reflected an art for art's sake creed. Though...