Bound For Glory

Surely director Hal Ashby felt a kinship with the subject of his 1976 film BOUND FOR GLORY.  Woody Guthrie was a troubladour who was too restless for married life and rabid capitalists.  A soul beset by extreme wanderlust, all the while getting to know those people who hunch in fields, picking artichokes, living in camps, hoping to be selected for a penny wage job doing same. Guthrie hopped trains and hitchhiked his way across the U.S.A., headed for California, a place that has "everything a man needs".  He would leave behind his dust bowl Texas town and a wife and children.

Ashby grew up in Oklahoma, eventually heading to the West Coast to fulfill his dreams of making movies.  Unlike Guthrie, he would remain in L.A. the rest of his life, eventually undone by his own excesses.  He wasn't any good at being a husband, lover, or a father.  Those unfortunate traits he did share with the man who would write over a thousand songs, including "This Land is Your Land".  Both men were compassionate yet selfish.  Both had a distaste for the Establishment, unable (for very long) to play by the System's rules.

Woody (David Carradine) lives a hardscrabble life in Depression era Pampa, TX, unable to get steady work to support his family.  He has two talents: painting signs and playing his guitar, but neither are in great demand, even if his talents are recognized and sometimes appreciated.  One day he decides to head to the Golden State to find his fortune, along with all the other Midwesterners and Southeners looking for their rainbows.  The trip is long, sometimes dangerous, always an education on how most Americans were barely surviving.  It would form his views, his politics, which infused nearly every song.

Once in California, Woody stays with a family in one of the desperate migrant camps.  This cresendo was quite unexpected. The artist meets Ozark Bule (Ronny Cox), a singer who visits the camps periodically, encouraging the workers to rally and form unions.  Bule gets Guthrie a job at an L.A. radio station, but the sponsors don't like songs that stoke fires in people's bellies.  Guthrie finds that unlike his new friend, he can't reconcile his deeply felt beliefs and a steady paycheck that requires compromise of those beliefs.  When Pauline (Gail Strickland), a soup kitchen volunteer, enters Guthrie's life he is attracted to her physical beauty, but dismayed when he finds she is in fact a rich widow who is likewise able to separate her liberal ideals from a comfortable lifestyle.  Is she trying to assuage some sort of guilt, even as she explains to Woody that she's "happy"?

Carradine is an unusual (and apparently not the first) choice to play the iconic folk wanderer, but he's just fine, seemingly attuned to the frustrated spirit who in turn frustrated his family, friends, and colleagues.  His words don't come out smoothly, from that first time we see him at the gas station to his exit from a luxury hotel.  He's got down home wisdom, but it's perhaps hindered by his own self importance (like most everything else in his life).  He's confident yet still seems quite unsure what he's supposed to do.  Carradine rarely got to work in prestigious movies so this performance was surely a deliverance for him, and he plays the guitar and sings well, too.

BOUND FOR GLORY, however, is not the expected classic, and far from a perfect film.  This is despite some gorgeous, Oscar winning cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler.  While Ashby and screenwriter Robert Getchell capture real folk as well as any movie of its time, their scenes mostly feel disconnected.  Most scenes are good, but they don't add up to a completely satisfying tapestry.  It feels like lengthy highlight reel at times.   This is a long film, and that didn't bug me, but Pembroke J. Herring and Robert C. Jones' editing, smooth as it is, leads to somewhat of a traffic jam of moments. Maybe they and Ashby were trying to mirror how life feels, especially on the road.   I did appreciate the film's refusal to portray Woody Guthrie as a saintly man.  Warts and all, there he is.