Bound for Glory (1976)

Bound for Glory, nominated for Best Picture of 1976, tells the story of folk singer Woody Guthrie's travels from Texas to California and his subsequent adventures in the Golden State during the years of the Great Depression. Rather than follow the usual biopic formula of trying to cover as many highlights of a person's long life as possible, this movie instead chooses as its focus a seminal period in Guthrie's life. It was during the Depression that he began to encounter huge numbers of the impoverished in America, and those encounters really changed who he was as a person and what he wanted to accomplish with his music and his life. This film, much like the more recent The Motorcycle Diaries, shows the growth in consciousness of an activist, the motivations behind a famous man's later actions.

The look of the movie is what struck me (and probably everyone else) first. It's filmed in that sort of golden sepia tone that we tend to associated with photographs of the time period in which the movie is set. Either that, or it's the color of the dust that so surrounds the people in Texas (and other parts of the country as well). The cinematographer is the great Haskell Wexler, and it's a nice tribute to his accomplishment that he is the first contributor named in the opening credits. The shots of Guthrie's travels by train, in particular, are just spectacular, and the scenes in the migrant worker "camps" (especially those shot at night) are equally awe-inspiring. Wexler won a well-deserved Oscar for his work here.

David Carradine plays Guthrie, and his performance is a far cry from the work he did on the TV series Kung Fu. It must have been a risky choice to select Carradine for this part. Here he plays Guthrie as a very stoic fellow, quietly observing a great deal of what happens around him. You can still sense how much the harsh treatment of the migrant workers affects him and why he wants to become more political with his music, despite the attempts by his radio station bosses and the advertisers to get him to avoid being so overtly political on the air. It's a calm performance, and Carradine is very good here, just as good as he was in Kill Bill a couple of years ago.

I also liked the work of Melinda Dillon. She seemed to be the It Girl of the 1970s when they needed someone to play a female character who's emotionally fragile and always on the edge of a crisis or breakdown. She actually plays two roles in the film, Guthrie's wife Mary and his radio singing partner Memphis Sue, and she's good in both roles.

I have to mention the music also. Rather than use original recordings by Guthrie, the film includes vocal performances by Carradine and the others like Dillon and Ronny Cox. They all turn out to be quite strong singers; I was as pleasantly surprised listening to them as I was when Sissy Spacek sang in Coal Miner's Daughter rather than use Loretta Lynn's original recordings. The songs that are chosen to be included here do more to set a tone for the action than almost any movie I've seen before or since. Someone (anyone? please?) in Hollywood needs to watch this film to get a sense of how to select the right song for the right moment without being heavy-handed or ironic.