April 8, 2001

BOUND FOR GLORY U.S., 1976. Color. Not Rated. 147 Minutes. Directed by Hal Ashby. Starring David Carradine, Ronny Cox, Melinda Dillon.

Bound for Glory, a best-picture Oscar nominee and winner for Haskell Wexler's glorious cinematography, is a bracing biographical drama about itinerant folk singer Woody Guthrie. Pauline Kael writes: "As the singer-composer-writer Woody Guthrie, David Carradine has an ornery intransigence that gives this Hal Ashby film a core, and the re-creation of the late 30s is superbly lighted and shot (by Haskell Wexler). The film has a feeling for detail-the matching profiles of two young Baez-like sisters in a squatters' camp, Carradine's lived-in, seat-sprung pants. There's real love in Ashby's staging of the incidents, and a unifying romanticism. Though the story doesn't build dramatically-it straggles just when you want it to soar and it bogs down in backward and forward movement and it's filled in with woozy generalities-this is an absorbing and impressive piece of work."