Bound for Glory

Director: Hal Ashby

1976 / 147min / 35mm

David Carradine, unquestionably the archetypal “’70s Plays the ’30s” star, plays folk troubadour Woody Guthrie in Ashby’s fictionalized biopic, which follows Woody from the Texas Dust Bowl to California, tracking as it does the development of his musical gifts and political conscience—and the parallel disintegration of his personal life. Through loving attention to the minutest period detail and the solemnly lovely photography by Haskell Wexler, making use of the new Steadicam for the first time in a feature, Bound for Glory redefined the way we think about the ’30s in color images, a film, per Pauline Kael, “so beautiful you can get a high from the dust.”