Bound for Glory

A film set in America in the 1930s. Woody lives in Texas. He has a wife and children, paints signs, and nobody has any money; dust storms are swallowing the town. One day he leaves everything and takes to the road. He is going to California; they say everyone who gets there finds work. He jumps a train. He travels in freight cars, at the roadside and in the backs of trucks. In California it is different. Police wait at the border, the labour camps are full, and the daily rate keeps falling. From there the film is a story about learning. Woody works the fruit fields, sings in the camps, and what he sees there changes what he writes. He finds a radio programme. He sings, becomes known, and earns good money. Then a sponsor steps in. Certain songs are unwelcome; unions, strikes and migrant camps are not to appear on the show. What the narrative is interested in is not music but compromise: throughout, Woody could repeatedly choose an easier life, and each time he does not. The narrative does not make him likeable. He leaves his family, does not keep his word, and the film does not hide it. The cinematographer Haskell Wexler won an Academy Award for the work. The long shot at the opening is counted among the first major uses in cinema of a camera-carrying system newly developed at the time; the camera comes down off a crane and keeps walking into the crowd. The film also won for score adaptation and was nominated in several categories including Best Picture. The source is Woody Guthrie's own memoir. David Carradine, Ronny Cox, Melinda Dillon and Gail Strickland are in the cast. Hal Ashby directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes American cinema of the 1970s and portraits of a period. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film runs over two and a half hours and the plot is deliberately loose.