Bound for Glory
The pivotal Steadicam sequence that first captivated industry insiders involved David Carradine's amble through a migrant camp. The Steadicam operator, Garrett Brown, descends into the scene on a Chapman crane and follows Woody Guthrie (Carradine) as he gets off a pickup truck and walks past some 900 extras. The sequence, which looks quite simple on film, posed a challenge to operator and crew in that, just as Brown stepped off the crane platform laden with his weighty armature, grips had to simultaneously counterbalance the crane arm to prevent it from becoming a human catapult.,Guthrie's singing partner on KFVD radio in Los Angeles was not named Memphis Sue. Her real name was Maxine Crissman, and she was known as "Lefty Lou," because she shared Guthrie's politics and was just as outspoken. In fact, Guthrie was never pressed to stop singing union-organizing songs; the station owner, Frank Burke, was a populist New Dealer who agreed with Guthrie. The reason Woody was fired was because after the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, he started singing songs that, mirroring the Communist Party line, denounced the war as a capitalist fraud.,Woody Guthrie: This land is your land/This land is my land/From California to the New York Island/From the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters/This land was made for you and me,Featured in Centennial: The Winds of Death (1979),Hard Travelin'
Written by Woody Guthrie
Performed by David Carradine,An unusual film, it starts by depicting the harsh life that many had to live during the Depression era, but then about halfway through it takes a sharp turn to become a biography of a musician. This change is rather jarring, as it comes unexpected. It manages to paint the glumness and the poverty of the Depression era so well that the sudden change in story direction just about violates what has gone before. In fairness, it does give us an idea of what the protagonist went through and what motivated his career, but is there not too much time spent on it? There is relatively little in the way of story until the music side enters in. It is quite meandering, and full of characters that have no importance later on, there is cause to wonder whether it could have been compressed down. For the adventure genre that the film best fits into, it is also relatively unexciting. The film is rather awkwardly put together, and it could do with a few events removed, but there are still a lot of good points to it. The cinematography won the film an Academy Award, as did the adapted music soundtrack, and both these elements are good. Haskell Wexler has chosen some interesting angles to shoot the film from, and the songs are fitted into the material quite well. Overall it is a good film, but a difficult one too. It takes patience to get through, but there are some good things in the end.,