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Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 20. August 8 1977

Film — Bound For Glory Embassy Theatre

Film

Bound For Glory Embassy Theatre

Film header

There's something about sitting in the plushest cinema in town, which was buiIt during the depression, watching a film about the depression. Something also, I suppose, to be said for the state of Hollywood nowadays, where films which do not disguise social injustice are often made. Yet Hollywood policy—to stay in the forefront of public interest' — hasn't changed. Bound for Glory faces up to the helplessness of people exploited by moneyed interests, especially when those people lack the organisation to do something about it. It shows that fear and propaganda are largely responsible for creating that lack. So much to its credit.

It also suggests (within its own frame of reference) that the only way to beat fear is to divorce oneself from the things it is aimed at. Woody Guthrie does broad social good by neglecting the specific : his songs boost the morale of the poor, but he had to desert his wife to sing them. For the men with stronger family ties, the problem is a little more acute. Bound for Glory chronicles Woody's development of political awareness. As biography it prefers to stay very close to the man (he is present in every scene) yet gains little insight for doing so. There are several reasons.

Woody is conviently revealed to be out of his depth asking or answering difficult questions (with the rich charity organiser, with his wife, with the artichoke picker). The film takes the issues no further than he could articulate them, falling back on scenes of thugs with batons, and the songs. Brutality is not itself revelatory in movies these days, and the songs, while speaking very clearly to their immediate audience, cannot have anything like the same effect on us.

Woody was a drifter, and knew how to search for freedom. In that sense he symbolised the aspirations of the people ; because his lifework was dedicated to them he became their mouthpiece. By some quirky paradox the film uses this to divorce him from them, almost as if (in line with the title and the 'hero' format) it is the glory which counts. In contradistinction to John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath emphasis on the individual precludes analysis of the general.

The script contributes to the blurring of purpose, with such telling lines as, "Things are getting pretty bad around here", and "What are we going to do ?" — "I don't know". And suffice to say of David Carradine in the lead role, that slit-eyed wariness and a toothy grin do not constitute an actor.

Whether all this is the result of the film's commercial aim or director Hal Ashby's lack of perception is not clear. Bound for Glory is summarised by Haskell Wexler's photography : often it is hard to distinguish the soft-focus from the dust. His Oscar is a fitting tribute to the way the film has embedded, and thereby blunted, social criticism in the thoroughly professional techniques traditionally used to escape it.

— Simon Wilson.