In his autobiography "Born to Run", Bruce Springsteen wrote how when he was first struggling as a musician, songwriting was a skill he chose to concentrate on refining. His writing was "the most distinctive thing (he) had," he felt back in the early 70s - as do his legions of fans to this day.

When I listen to Springsteen, I don't just feel a story being told or a mood, I feel the characters, as if years of inner life are conveyed in minutes. Springsteen's 1982 song "Atlantic City" is one of the most cinematic I've ever heard, with a simple but evocative story (a young man in desperate love who turns to crime). "Atlantic City"'s verses escalate hopelessness, but one topped off with a chorus of possibility in the chorus.

"Well, I got a job and put my money in, but I got debts that no honest man can pay" in the second verse to "I met this man last night and I'll do him a little favor" in the fourth, the boy's story goes like this clearly before your eyes. Given how rooted his music is in storytelling, it's no surprise that The Boss is a cinephile. My / film colleague Caroline Madden literally wrote the book on Springsteen and the movies, "Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Boss Sound in Film and Television."

Springsteen has written film themes including The Streets of Philadelphia and The Wrestler and directed (with Tom Zimney) the 2019 concert film named after and featuring his 19th album, Western Stars. He will be a movie star in a different way because Jeremy Allen White has been cast as Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. for the making of his sixth album "Nebraska".

Showing his movie buff, Springsteen also guest starred on Turner Classic Movies in 2019. introducing a double bill of The Searchers and A Face In The Crowd with Ben Mankiewicz. (But he still won't appear on The Simpsons.) Some of his other favorites, as reported by IndieWireranging from '40s noir to '70s B-thrillers: The Grapes of Wrath to Double Indemnity to Rolling Thunder and more.

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

The "humanism" in "The Grapes of Wrath" is one of the key 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 comes home and can't adjust, much like Springsteen's oft-misinterpreted "Born In The USA" In 2017, he said "Born To Run" was also inspired by watching cars how they race in his hometown. Asbury Park and "every picture B-hotrod."

"Born To Run" was Springsteen's second and breakthrough album, and it opens with another song about driving and longing: "Thunder Road." That song has the same title as a 1958 Robert Mitchum painting. Mitchum, the coolest (and in-demand) movie star of the dayhe plays Lucas Dulin, a salesman in the American South. Funnily enough, Springsteen was less of a die-hard fan than he suggests; he just saw it poster for "Thunder Road" when he wrote his, so the song isn't based on the movie as much as what the poster made him imagine.

"Lightning 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's settings encourage that. But perhaps because both the song and the film have a driving motif, there is a common theme of wanting a better life. In Mitchum's "Born To Run," Lucas wants it for his brother (played by Mitchum's own son, James), while the singer in Springsteen's song encourages his lover to walk with him to freedom.

"Born to Run" and "Thunder Road" complement each other; both are about young-but-not-forever couples trying to get away and see what the road brings. In turn, both poems use the physical setting of the open road to drive the characters' feelings: an urgent desperation to find somewhere else because that somewhere 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 "The River", the song of the same name from the album No. by Springsteen from 1980. 5. It is a Flavored with Flannery O'Connor melancholy about a working-class couple where any of the youthful hope found in Born To Run has vanished.

Do you remember Blue Valentine starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as middle-aged couple Dean and Cindy, whose love is dead and soon to be married? I associate that movie more with The River than Tom Waits' Blue Valentine album. Crazy, right? No, if you listen to the first verses, I discover:

"For my 19th birthday, I received a union card and a wedding dress

We went down to the courtroom, and the judge put it all to rest,

No smiles on the wedding day, no walking 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. Kane and the classic noir films based on his novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. These stories are two of a kind, as 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's lovers don't resort to murder (except in "Atlantic City"), but they everything dreamers beaten down by life, and still trying to overcome their meager circumstances, which are short.

Then the opening text of The River says that the narrator's fate was sealed from birth:

"I come from down in the valley,

Where, sir, when you are young,

They raise you to do like your father."

To quote another Bruce poem, "You were born into this life paying for the sins of others' pasts." His songs, and many of the films he loves, explore how people live with the burden of that payment.