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Bound for Glory, 1976

Starring: David Carradine, Ronny Cox

Directed by: Hal Ashby

Written by: Woody Guthrie

Language: English

Country: USA

Runtime: 147 min

MPAA Rating:

Rating:7.3

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The mood of Bound for Glory is bittersweet, sentimental, and captivating. The plot centers around being rich or poor, Americana, and the life of a musician. It is a drama and period movie. Stylistically, Bound for Glory has a road movie structure and is a melodrama. In approach, it is serious and realistic. It takes place, at least partly, in the desert and in the countryside. Bound for Glory is set in Oklahoma, Texas, and California. It happens in the 1930s. The musical score is folk. Bound for Glory is drawn from a biography, originally a true story, and based on a book. The movie is known for being critically acclaimed and an Oscar winner.

Summary of Bound for Glory

Hal Ashby's film of Woody Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory, recounts the protest singer's life starting when he's a young man with a wife and two children, trying to find work as a sign painter in the Dust Bowl-ravaged Texas of the 1930s. He leaves his wife, Mary (Melinda Dillon), with her family and, like thousands of others, rides the rails to California. Along the way he sees the brutal treatment of men by the railroad's hired thugs before being thrown into a hard life in the migrant workers camps of the San Fernando Valley. He begins to write songs about everything he's seen and joins Ozark Bule on the radio, not just singing about union organizing, but actually going to meetings and brawling with union-busting goons. When the radio station management, as a result of pressure from its advertisers, tells Woody--who's now attracting a following with his protest songs and ballads about the lives of oppressed people--that he can't do those songs, he gives up the radio program and decides to ride the rails to New York to seek a larger audience for his music. David Carradine, as Guthrie, does his own singing, giving an intimacy to the songs that might have been lost by dubbing. The award-winning cinematography by Haskell Wexler captures both the bleakness of the Great Depression and the beautiful grandeur of America, exactly what Guthrie expressed in his songs.