Bruce Springsteen's favorite movies inspired his songwriting

She autobiography “Born To Run” Bruce Springsteen wrote that when he was first struggling as a musician, songwriting was a skill he chose to focus on perfecting. His writing was “the most special thing (for him) that he's done,” he felt back in the early 1970s — as his legions of fans do to this day.

When I listen to Springsteen, I don't just feel a story or a conjured mood, I feel the characters, as if years of inner life are conveyed in a few minutes. Springsteen's 1982 song “Atlantic City” is one of the most cinematic I've ever heard, with a simple but powerful story (a young man in desperate love turns to crime). The verses of “Atlantic City” heighten the hopelessness, but this is accompanied by the refrain of possibility in the chorus.

“Well, I got a job and put my money away, but I got debts that no honest man can pay” in the second verse “I met this guy last night and I'll do him a little favor”. fourth, the boy's story plays out so crisply before your eyes. With his music rooted in stories, it's no surprise that The Boss is a cinephile. My / film colleague Caroline Madden literally wrote the book on Springsteen and movies, “Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Boss Sound in Film and Television.”

Springsteen has written themes for films including “Streets of Philadelphia” and “The Wrestler” and produced a 2019 concert film with Tom Zimney named after and featuring his 19th album Western Stars. He is going to become a movie star in a different way because Jeremy Allen White has been cast as Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. about making his sixth album “Nebraska”.

Showing his cinephile faith, Springsteen also starred in Turner Classic Movies in 2019. with Ben Mankiewicz presents a double bill of The Searchers and A Face In The Crowd. (But he still won't be on The Simpsons.) Some of his other favorites, as reported by IndieWireranging from 1940s noir to 1970s B thrillers: “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Double Indemnity” and “Rolling Thunder” and more.

The stories of these films are similar to the ones Springsteen explores in his songs, so his love for them reflects what compels his own voice and reveals another component of his influences.

The “humanism” in “Grapes of Wrath” is one of the main feelings Springsteen tries (and always succeeds) to capture in his music, he said at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. “Rolling Thunder” is about a Vietnam War veteran who returns home and can't adjust, just like Springsteen's oft-misinterpreted “Born In The USA.” In 2017, he said that “Born To Run” was inspired by both watching auto races in his hometown. Asbury Park and “every B-hotrod image.”

“Born To Run” was Springsteen's second and greatest album, and opens with another song about driving and longing: “Thunder Road.” This song has the exact same title as the 1958 Robert Mitchum picture. Mitchum, the coolest (and in-demand) movie star of the dayplayed by Lucas Doolin, an assassin in the American South. Amusingly, Springsteen was not as die-hard a fan as this suggests; he had only seen poster “Thunder Road” when he wrote his, so the song isn't based on the movie as much as what the poster made him imagine.

“Thunder Road” doesn't have much in common with the movie; unlike the film's Appalachian Mountains, Springsteen is a Jersey boy to the core, and his song settings reflect that. But perhaps because both the song and the film share a common driving motive, the common theme is the desire for a better life. In Mitchum's “Born To Run,” Lucas wishes it for his brother (played by Mitch's own son James), while the Springsteen singer encourages his lover to walk the path to freedom with him.

“Born to Run” and “Thunder Road” complement each other; they are both about young but not forever couples who try to escape and see what the road will bring them. Both songs, on the other hand, use a physical open road to evoke the feelings of the characters: an urgent desperation to find somewhere else, because it has to be better than here.

Speaking of which, many of Springsteen's songs are about doomed lovers, or at least lovers doomed to fail. “Born To Run”, “Thunder Road” and also “The River” are songs of the same name from Springsteen's 1980 album No. 5. It is a A taste of Flanery O'Connor the melancholy of a working-class couple who have lost any of the youthful hope found in “Born To Run”.

Remember the movie Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a middle-aged couple, Dean and Cindy, whose love is dead and marriage is about to follow? I associate this movie more with “The River” than Tom Waits' album “Blue Valentine”. Crazy, right? No, if you listen to the first verses, I find:

“For my 19th birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat

We went to the courthouse and the judge calmed it all down,

No wedding day smiles, no walking down the aisle,

No flowers, no wedding dress.”

What puts this song in a new context for me is that Springsteen is a fan of writer James M. Cain and classic noir films based on his novels Double Reward and The Postman Always Rings Twice. These two stories are the same in that they are both about an adulterous couple who plan to kill the woman's husband in order to be freer and richer than before. Springsteen lovers don't go for murder (except in “Atlantic City”), but they do is Dreamers who have been crushed by life and are still trying to get ahead of their meager circumstances that come their way.

Then the opening texts of “The River” say that the narrator's fate was sealed from birth:

“I come from the valley below,

Where, sir, when you are young

They raise you to do like your dad did.

To quote another Bruce song, “You were born into this life paying for the sins of someone else's past.” His songs and many of the films he loves explore how people live with the burden of this payment.