ALICE'S RESTAURANT (1969)

Arlo Guthrie, son of famous folk singer Woody Guthrie, came to fame in 1967 with "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," a 20 minute shaggy-dog story-song which occupied an entire side of the album Alice's Restaurant. The song, even when edited down to 5 minutes, never made the top 40 but it became an underground sensation, getting lots of airplay on album rock stations, and the album went gold. In 1969, Arthur Penn made a full-length movie based on the song with Guthrie playing himself and performing chunks of the original song as narration. The film retains the main narrative of the song at its center (a Thanksgiving celebration which ends with Arlo getting thrown in jail for littering—actually, dumping quite a bit of trash on public land), but builds a somewhat autobiographical plot around that. Arlo, trying to jumpstart a folk music career, becomes eligible for the draft. He starts college (mostly in order to get an exemption), gets in an altercation with hippie baiters, quits school, plays gigs in small clubs, and winds up spending some time with his old friends Alice (Patricia Quinn) and Ray (James Broderick) in a small town in Massachusetts. Alice, who runs a restaurant, has bought, with Ray, a deconsecrated church where they live with a rotating group of hippie youngsters. After a big Thanksgiving celebration, Arlo and a friend cart all the leftovers and trash to the city dump, only to find it closed for the holiday. They find a small cliff over which others have dumped some trash so they follow suit, but the local cop Officer Obie arrests them for littering, cuffing them and throwing them in jail until Alice pays their bail. After they're found not guilty, Arlo is called up by the military only to find that his arrest record makes him ineligible for the draft.

This comic story has been drawn out to feature film length and made more serious by fleshing out the characters. We see Arlo visit his dying father in the hospital and fending off the advances of an underage groupie (Shelley Plimpton, original cast member of Hair and mother of Martha Plimpton). Tensions between Alice and Ray, mom and dad figures to the hippie kids, grow when Ray starts spending too much time hanging out with a young man named Shelly (Michael McClanathan) who has just come out of heroin rehab, as if Ray is trying to escape "adulting" (as we might say today). There's also the intimation that Alice and Arlo are attracted to each other, though they don't seem to become intimate. The song's happy ending is undercut by the tragic death of Shelly and, despite the hippie wedding of Alice and Ray, the famous ambiguous ending shot of Alice, standing outside the church looking utterly lost as the kids leave and Ray seems to retreat into himself. (In real life, the two had divorced before the movie was made.)

This is sometimes considered one of those movies that was heralding the end of the peace & love generation, but it seems as if every movie that was ever made about the 60s was doing that—is there a mainstream movie that actually celebrated the hippie generation? Though it might not bother all viewers, this film has a tone problem: the events of the song, which take up less than half the running time, are presented mostly in an antic mood, and the rest in a downbeat, elegiac mood, and the two halves, while occasionally effective, generally work against each other. Guthrie is no actor, so Quinn and Broderick (Matthew Broderick's dad), both very good, win acting honors. McClanathan, a young man from Ohio, is quite good as Shelly, but after only a couple more roles, he left movie acting behind. William Obanhein, the real Officer Obie, plays himself, somewhat uncomfortably. M. Emmet Walsh has a wonderful double-talk moment at the Army induction office. Pete Seeger has a short scene as himself in Woody Guthrie's hospital room. Not a bad movie, exactly, but one that can only be viewed as a period novelty. Pictured at top right are Seeger and Guthrie; at left is Michael McClanathan). [DVD]