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BOUND FOR GLORY
1976
DIRECTED BY HAL ASHBY
2:00 PM WARNER GRAND THEATER
(147 minutes.) Director: Hal Ashby.
Writer: Robert Getchell, based on the autobiography of Woody Guthrie.
Cinematographer: Haskell Wexler. Editor: Robert C. Jones. Music:
Leonard Rosenman. Starring: David Carradine, Melinda Dillon, Ji-Tu
Cumbuka, Randy Quaid, Lee McLaughlin, Ronnie Cox.
There is a moment near the heart of Bound for Glory
which astonished viewers for a purely technical reason when the film
first came out. It comes when Woody Guthrie (David Carradine) takes to
riding the rails amid the great migrations of the poor of the Great
Depression. He jumps aboard a moving train, and we not only follow as
he climbs the steel ladder bracing a freight car, but stay on his heels
as he walks along its crowded top.
An easy shot now, but in this context? We are witnessing the first use
of steadicam in a commercial film. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler
pioneered its use. (This innovation, which uses a gyroscope to
neutralize the otherwise incurable jitter and jostle that dog a
hand-held camera, grew, as so many camera advances did then, out of the
American space program.) The emotional effect, as director Hal Ashby
was able to demonstrate across the course of this intimate epic, is
that we are brought more immediately into the action -- and the world
around our protagonist becomes more lifelike in its continuity.
Guthrie was, of course, the great wandering poet and songwriter who
composed our American folk-anthem, “This Land is Your Land,” and this
film (based on his memoirs) recounts his life from the moment when he
began to define himself. At first, trying to support his wife (Melinda
Dillon) and their baby daughters, he’s willing to try anything, even
“evaluate a man’s character” for a dollar. Out of this he is briefly
mistaken for a fortune teller and faith healer, but his canny sense of
people and warm, intuitive touch keeps him from misleading or
exploiting anybody, even as he manages to do good in these adoptive
roles. Once he moves onto the road, though, bearing witness to the
teeming masses, the fight to keep his integrity becomes steeper, and
more uphill. He gets his own radio show in Los Angeles, but his
sponsors want him strictly soft, and folksy -- while he wants to belt
it out, and sing of what people are really thinking and feeling in the
hard times around them.
Carradine is a wonderful choice for this role, given that his father John Carradine is such an iconic figure in The Grapes of Wrath
-- that unofficial companion film to which this one is in open debt.
Melinda Dillon, the loveable, excellent single Mom in Close
Encounters,¬plays a double role here: She is not only Guthrie’s wife
Mary, but later, playing a different character entirely, his singing
partner, Memphis Sue.
Pauline Kael resisted the overall thrust of Bound For Glory
when it first came out -- she would have preferred the movie not
portray Guthrie in such a saintly way, but she expressed what is great
about Carradine with a penetration that cannot be improved upon: “At
times, he has his father’s gaunt-angel Casey look,” she wrote in The
New Yorker. “But even though the movie makes him a political innocent
and rather too sweet, Carradine’s own hellion’s unreachableness saves
him. This is not a man looking for love; this is one tough customer.
He’s a very sculptural actor -- the neat, close-cropped head, somnolent
yet alert, the lower lip debating possible pleasure, the body lean but
with the gut poking out a bit. He may not have range, but he’s a
wonderful image -- wiry and self-contained.”
