Bound for Glory

MOVIE #1,466 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.21.24 WELL, HONG? • CHAPTER 19 My first thought when I started this was “Jesus, this is 147 minutes long” but it was mostly a pleasant affair. After a string of lesser titles, my James Hong journey has swung us back around to the middle of the road with this, Hal Ashby’s Oscar-winning biopic of Woody Guthrie starring David Carradine (nominated for Academy Awards, it won for cinematography and score). Ashby deserves a Director Focus at some point, truth be told. But one series in utero trumps that which hasn’t been conceived yet: demz da rules. This is another single-scene role for James, who plays a diner owner in 1930s Los Angeles. He’s very good in the way you want someone in a nothing role to be: having personality without chewing up the scenery…

I like Woody Guthrie in a vague kind of way and seeing that this was based on his own partly fictionalized autobiography intrigued me even more. He’s one of those American figures that’s mythical to some, and to others just the guy who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” a song you learn to sing in grade school. Which, when you learn more about his hard leftist ideals, is kind of funny honestly. So there’s not a ton to say about this film. It’s, in some ways, as stock an epic Hollywood biopic as they get. But it looks fantastic — take this mesmerizing matte shot of a coming dust storm…


(and check out this “making of” of the shot, which somehow has less than 1k views on YouTube)

I think Carradine is great in the lead, both in conveying the complicated drama of his wandering personality and the vast amount of singing required. On a personal level, I just find there’s a pretty low ceiling for these movies. This is one of the better overlong biopics I’ve seen recently, although I think you probably need to have some amount of interest in Guthrie for it to be worth your while.

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Bound for Glory is a 1976 American biographical film directed by Hal Ashby and loosely adapted by Robert Getchell from Woody Guthrie's 1943 partly fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory. The film stars David Carradine as folk singer Woody Guthrie, with Ronny Cox, Melinda Dillon, Gail Strickland, John Lehne, Ji-Tu Cumbuka and Randy Quaid. Much of the film is based on Guthrie's attempt to humanize the desperate Okie Dust Bowl refugees in California during the Great Depression. It was released on December 5, 1976.