The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 14-20
Bound for Glory (1976)
Directed by Hal Ashby
Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic is memorably beautiful, a big-budget, earnest production from the great director of 70s cynicism and chill. Working with cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who deservedly won an Oscar for his efforts), Ashby’s film is lyrical and epic, sweeping across a sun-baked, dusty America tramped over by hobos, grannies, and blind men, desperate Americans on their way to California. A surprising choice, then and now, to play Guthrie, David Carradine is brilliant in the role. His muted, unheroic performance—restless, selfish, deftly intuitive—manages to accomplish a difficult thing: it undercuts the Guthrie myth while betraying why it could have been so popularly believed. Jeremy Polacek (December 16, 28, 6:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam”)