Wow David Carradine is amazing in this film! The story is a little slow at times but I would recommend this based on Carradine's performance. The music is also excellent.

I found this looking for films about the Dust Bowl, and although it doesn't really get into that, "Bound for Glory" still managed to grip me with it's beautiful soundtrack and pleasing photography. The grim realities of the depression are very well presented in this, and the performances are all around great. My only real problem with the movie as a whole is that it sometimes seemed much more concerned with pushing its own politics than in telling the story of Woody Guthrie and the Depression.

I was definitely surprised (in a good way) by Carradine's performance. Apparently this film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, and it absolutely deserved it. The long shot of Woody and Slim reclining on top of the train and disappearing into the tunnel was a thing of beauty. However, the structure of the story was a little too repetitive for me (clip of Woody singing, short dramatic scene, fight, repeat). I think Woody's life lends itself better to a documentary, not a Hollywood-type picture.

A bit slow in the beginning (some of which I think could have been cut), it took me a while to get into the story. Picked up quite a bit after Woody made it to California and you started to see his passion come to life. I would have liked to see a more extensive timeline of what happened to him after the point at which the movie ended, but all in all, a good depiction of those years of Woody's life and those years in American history. The music itself is pretty moving.

Hal Ashby's biopic on Woody Guthrie casts Woody as the communist activist as well as the traveling troubadour. It's a simple, engaging film, but suffers immensely from being overstretched and overlong. It also has too many songs which (while pretty literate for folk music) all sound pretty much the same.