Harry Crews – Survival is Triumph Enough

I’ve been meaning to watch this short documentary concerning Harry Crews for some time now, but I hadn’t been able to for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it appeared that you could purchase and download it on a site called bside.com for about $2, but whenever I tried to add it to the shopping basket nothing happened. Then I realised that the film is now hosted on another site, indieflix.com, which may explain why it wasn’t working on bside. I didn’t really want to order the dvd, simply to download it, so I was pleased today to see that indieflix are finally allowing people to buy and download the film. You pay $2 for 30 day access to this 30 minute film. Here’s the youtube trailer:

And here’s the page on indieflix:

http://www.indieflix.com/film/harry-crews-survival-is-triumph-enough-29834/

So what is it like? Well, if you are looking for anything to do with Crews the writer you’ll be sorely disappointed here. I don’t think he mentioned a single one of his books in the film, or his writing career at all. For the most part, this is about Crews’ early life. There are a number of harrowing anecdotes, most of which had been written about in A Childhood. So I guess I’m saying there isn’t much new information here. But I don’t care. Watching Crews rail against the world in his seventies is triumph enough for me.