Kino Eye: Woody Guthrie on-screen

Submitted by AWL on 26 January, 2021 - 4:47 Author: John Cunningham
Woody Guthrie depicted in Bound for Glory

At the Biden inauguration, bejewelled Jennifer Lopez’s warbling and truncated rendering of the Woody Guthrie classic This Land is Your Land was a travesty of the real thing. Fortunately, you can go online and hear the original. There is also the semi-fictionalised film of Guthrie’s life, Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, 1976), which covers the time from when he leaves his home in the Oklahoma Dustbowl and heads for California. Angered by what he sees in the migrant camps and the brutal treatment of migrant workers, he dedicates himself, through his songs, to fight their cause. It is rumoured that while shooting the film David Carradine, who plays Guthrie, walked off the set to join a demonstration of modern-day migrants and held up filming for three hours.

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