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In it biography “Born to Run”, Bruce Springsteen wrote that when he was first struggling as a musician, songwriting was the skill he chose to focus on. His writing was “the most different thing [he] gone,” he felt in the early '70s—as do his legions to this day.
When I listen to Springsteen, I don't just feel a story being told or a mood created, I feel the characters, as if he's channeling years of inner life into a few minutes. Springsteen's 1982 song “Atlantic City” is one of the most cinematic songs I've ever heard, with its simple but powerful story (a desperate young man in love who turns to crime). The verses of “Atlantic City” add to the desperation, but the chorus is joined by an aversion to possibility.
“Well, I got a job and left my money, but I've got debts that no honest man can pay,” says the second verse, “I met this guy last night and I'm gonna do a little good for him.” fourth, the boy's story plays out so vividly before your eyes. Given how rooted his music is in storytelling, it's no surprise that Boss is a movie buff. My co-star Caroline Madden literally wrote the book on Springsteen and movies, “Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Boss' Voice in Film and Television.”
Springsteen wrote film themes including “Streets of Philadelphia” and “The Wrestler” and directed (with Thom Zimny) a 2019 concert film titled and featuring his 19th album, Stars of the West. He is about to become a movie star in a different way because Jeremy Allen White will play Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. about the making of his sixth album, Nebraska.
Showing his movie buff credentials, Springsteen also made a guest appearance on Turner Classic Movies in 2019. The Searchers and A Face In The Crowd present a double bill with Ben Mankiewicz. (However he still won't be starring in “The Simpsons.”) Some of her other favorites are, This was reported by IndieWireFrom '40s film noir to '70s B-thrillers: The Grapes of Wrath to Double Indemnity and Rolling Thunder.
The stories of these films are similar to the ones Springsteen explores in his songs, so his love of them reflects what compels his voice and reveals another ingredient in his influences.
Springsteen's Thunder Road shares a Robert Mitchum photo caption
He said at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival that the “humanism” of “The Grapes of Wrath” is one of the main feelings that Springsteen tries (and always succeeds) to capture in his music. “Rolling Thunder” is about a Vietnam War veteran who comes home and can't readjust, much like Springsteen's oft-misinterpreted “Born in the U.S.A.” . Asbury Park and “every B-hotrod photo.”
“Born To Run” was Springsteen's second and breakthrough album and opens with another song about drive and longing: “Thunder Road.” This song has the same title as the 1958 Robert Mitchum picture. Mitchum, the best (and most in-demand) movie star of the eraHe plays Lucas Doolin, a smuggler in the American South. Amusingly, Springsteen was a less die-hard fan of this suggestion; he only saw her poster For “Thunder Road” he wrote it himself, so the song is not based on the movie as the poster makes it out to be.
It doesn't have much in common with the movie Thunder Road; Unlike the Appalachian mountains in the film, Springsteen is a Jersey boy to himself, and the setting of his song is a reminder of that. But perhaps because both the song and the film share a driving motif, there is a common theme of longing for a better life. In Mitchum's “Born To Run,” Lucas wants it for his brother (played by Mitchum's own son James), while Springsteen's singer encourages his lover to join him on the road to freedom.
“Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” complement each other; both are about young but not-forever couples trying to escape and see what the road will bring them. In turn, both songs use the physical environment of the open road to evoke the characters' feelings: an urgent desperation to find somewhere else, because that place must be better than here.
Bruce Springsteen loves film noir
By the way, many of Springsteen's songs are about imprisoned lovers, or at least lovers doomed to unfulfillment. “Born To Run”, “Thunder Road” and also “The River” from Springsteen's 1980 album of the same name. 5. This a Flannery O'Connor scented Born to Run Melancholy about a working-class couple who have lost any of their youthful hope.
Remember Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy, a middle-aged couple whose love has died and soon-to-be-married, Blue Valentine? I associate that movie more with The River than Tom Waits' album Blue Valentine. Crazy, huh? Not if you listen to the first verses, I find:
“I got a union card and a wedding dress for my 19th birthday
We went down to the courthouse and the judge calmed things down,
No wedding day laughs, no walk down the aisle,
No flowers, no wedding dress.
What puts these songs in a new context for me is that Springsteen is a fan of writer James M. Cain and Classic noir films based on the novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. These stories are of two types, as both are about an adulterous couple who plan to kill a woman's husband in order to become freer and richer than before. Springsteen's lovers (with the exception of “Atlantic City”) don't resort to murder, but they there is dreamers are beaten down by life and still try to outrun their meager circumstances.
Then the opening words of “The River” say that the narrator's fate is sealed from birth:
“I come from the valley,
Where, sir, when you were young,
They raise you the way your father did.”
To quote another Bruce song, “You were born into this life paying for the sins of someone else's past.” Many of his songs and his favorite films explore how people live with the burden of this payment.
