Alice's Restaurant (film)

Alice's Restaurant

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Arthur Penn
Produced by Hillard Elkins
Joseph Manduke
Screenplay by Venable Herndon
Arthur Penn
Starring Arlo Guthrie
Pat Quinn
William Obanhein
James Broderick
Pete Seeger
Lee Hays
Music by Arlo Guthrie
Garry Sherman
Cinematography Michael Nebbia
Edited by Dede Allen
Distributed by United Artists
Release dates
  • August 19, 1969 (1969-08-19)
Running time
 111 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Box office $6,100,000 (North American theatrical rentals)[1][2]

Alice's Restaurant is a 1969 American comedy film co-written and directed by Arthur Penn. It is an adaptation of the 1967 folk song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," originally written and sung by Arlo Guthrie. The film stars Guthrie as himself, with Pat Quinn as Alice Brock and James Broderick as Ray Brock. Contrary to popular belief, while Arlo Guthrie wrote the lyrics and music for the narrative song "Alice’s Restaurant Massacree," he neither wrote nor co-wrote the screenplay for the film Alice’s Restaurant, which was instead co-written by Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn.[3]

Alice's Restaurant was released on August 19, 1969, a few days after Guthrie appeared at the Woodstock Festival. A soundtrack album for the film was also released by United Artists Records. The soundtrack includes a studio version of the title song, which was originally divided into two parts (one for each album side); a 1998 CD reissue on the Rykodisc label presents this version of the song in full, and adds several bonus tracks to the original LP.

Plot

In 1965, Arlo Guthrie (as himself) has attempted to avoid the draft by attending college in Montana. His long hair and unorthodox approach to study gets him in trouble with local police as well as residents. He quits school, following which he hitchhikes back East. He first visits his father Woody Guthrie (Joseph Boley) in the hospital.

Arlo ultimately returns to his friends Ray (James Broderick) and Alice Brock (Pat Quinn) at their home, a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts where they welcome friends and like-minded bohemian types to "crash". Among these are Arlo's school friend Roger (Geoff Outlaw) and artist Shelley (Michael McClanathan), an ex-heroin addict who is in a motorcycle racing club. Alice is starting up a restaurant in nearby Stockbridge. Frustrated with Ray's lackadaisical attitude, she has an affair with Shelley, and ultimately leaves for New York to visit Arlo and Roger. Ray comes to take her home, saying he has invited a "few" friends for Thanksgiving.

The central point of the film is the story told in the song: After Thanksgiving dinner, Arlo and his friends decide to do Alice and Ray a favor by taking several months worth of garbage from their house to the town dump. After loading up a red VW microbus with the garbage, and "shovels, and rakes and other implements of destruction", they head for the dump. Finding the dump closed for the holiday, they drive around and discover a pile of garbage that someone else had placed at the bottom of a short cliff. At that point, as mentioned in the song, "...we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down."

The next morning they receive a phone call from "Officer Obie" (Police Chief William Obanhein as himself), who asks them about the garbage. After admitting to littering, they agree to pick up the garbage and to meet him at the police station. Loading up the red VW microbus, they head to the police station where they are immediately arrested.

As the song puts it, they are then driven to the scene of the crime where the police are engaged in a hugely elaborate investigation. At the trial, Officer Obie is anxiously awaiting the chance to show the judge the 27 photos of the crime but the judge (James Hannon as himself) happens to be blind, using a seeing eye dog, and simply levies a $50 fine, orders them to pick up the garbage and then sets them free. The garbage is eventually taken to New York and placed on a barge. Meanwhile, Arlo has fallen in love with a beautiful Asian girl, Mari-chan (Tina Chen).

Later in the movie, Arlo is called up for the draft, in a surreal depiction of the bureaucracy at the New York City military induction center on Whitehall Street. He attempts twice to make himself unfit for induction, first by getting drunk the night before and performing the physical exams while hung over, then by acting like a homicidal maniac in front of the psychiatrist, but fails both times (the latter incident actually gets him praise). Because of Guthrie's criminal record for littering, he is first sent to the Group W bench (where convicts wait), then outright rejected as unfit for military service, not because of the littering incident, but because the government is suspicious of "his kind" and instead opted to submit his personal records to Washington, DC.

Upon returning to the church, Arlo finds Ray and members of the motorcycle club showing home movies of a recent race. Shelley enters, obviously high, and Ray beats him until he reveals his stash of heroin, concealed in some art he has been working on. Shelley roars off into the night on his motorcycle to his death; the next day, Woody dies. Ray and Alice have a hippie-style wedding in the church, and a drunken Ray proposes to sell the church and start a country commune instead, revealing that he blames himself for Shelley's death. The film ends with Alice standing alone in her bedraggled wedding gown on the church steps.

Cast

Cameos and special appearances

The real Alice Brock makes a number of cameo appearances in the film. In the scene where Ray and friends are installing insulation, she is wearing a brown turtleneck top and has her hair pulled into a ponytail. In the Thanksgiving dinner scene, she is wearing a bright pink blouse. In the wedding scene, she is wearing a Western-style dress.

Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein ("Officer Obie") plays himself in the film, explaining to Newsweek magazine that making himself look like a fool was preferable to having somebody else make him look like a fool.[4] Judge James E. Hannon, who presided over the littering trial, also appears as himself in the film.[5]

The film also features the first credited film appearance of character actor M. Emmet Walsh, playing the Group W sergeant. (Walsh had previously appeared as an uncredited extra in Midnight Cowboy, released three months prior.) The film also features cameo appearances by American folksingers/songwriters Lee Hays (playing a reverend at an evangelical meeting) and Pete Seeger (playing himself).

Differences from real life

The original song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" that formed the basis for the film's central plotline was, for the most part, a true story. However, most of the other events and characters in the film were fictional creations of the screenplay's writers. According to Guthrie, commenting in the DVD's audio commentary section, the film used the names of real people but took numerous liberties with actual events. Richard Robbins, Guthrie's co-defendant in real-life, was replaced by the fictional Roger Crowther for the film (in the song, he remained anonymous). The subplots involving the Shelly character were completely fictional and not based on any real people or incidents in Guthrie's life;[6] his character's motorcycle club was loosely based on the Trinity Motorcycle Club (or, by a conflicting account, the Triangle Motorcycle Club), a real-life group of cyclists that associated with the Brocks and were alluded to in another Guthrie song, the "Motorcycle Song."[7] The film also has Guthrie being forced to leave a Montana town after "creating a disturbance" – i.e., several town residents object to Guthrie's long hair, and gang up to throw him through a plate glass window. This never happened, and Guthrie expresses regret that Montana got a "bad rap" in the film. In reality, during the time of the littering incident and trial, Guthrie was still enrolled in a Montana college, and was only in Stockbridge for the long Thanksgiving weekend (he would drop out of college at the end of the semester).[5]

Alice Brock has spoken very negatively of the film's portrayal of her. She stated in a 2014 interview "That wasn’t me. That was someone else’s idea of me."[7] She took particular offense at the film falsely implying that she had slept with Guthrie (among others) and noted that she had never associated with heroin users.[6] She also noted that the song and film brought a large amount of unwanted publicity: "It just really impinged on your privacy. It’s just amazing how brazen people can be when you’re a supposed public figure(…) We sold the church at that point."

Reception

Critical reception of the film has wavered between seeing the film as light entertainment and as a political statement. In 2009, Politics Daily wrote that, "calling the 1969 film a comedy misses its noir backbeat of betrayed romanticism, and thinking of it as a madcap autobiography misses its politics. This is a movie driven by the military draft and the Vietnam War".[8]

When interviewed in 1971, the film's director, Arthur Penn, said of the film: "What I tried to deal with is the US's silence and how we can best respond to that silence. ... I wanted to show that the US is a country paralyzed by fear, that people were afraid of losing all they hold dear to them. It's the new generation that's trying to save everything".[9]

In being offered the opinion that violence is not so important in the film, Penn replied: "Alice's Restaurant is a film of potential transition because the characters know, in some way, what they are looking for. ... It's important to remember that the characters in Alice's Restaurant are middle-class whites. They aren't poor or hungry or working class. They are not in the same boat as African Americans. But they're not militants either. In this respect the church dwellers are not particularly threatening. They find it easy to live there, even if most people can't afford such a luxury. From this point of view, this film depicts a very specific social class. It's a bourgeois film".[10]

The final scene is not of a loving couple seeing off their guests, but of Alice standing alone looking into the distance, watching the guests leave, as if knowing that her future is in fact bleak with Ray (Alice and Ray had divorced by the time the film was released).[11] Arthur Penn has said that the final scene was intended as comment on the inevitable passing of the counterculture dream: "In fact, that last image of Alice on the church steps is intended to freeze time, to say that this paradise doesn’t exist any more, it can only endure in memory".[12] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune listed Alice's Restaurant as third best film of 1969.[13]

The film grossed $6,300,000[2] in the United States, making it the 21st highest-grossing film of 1969.

Awards

See also

References

  1. ↑ "All-time Film Rental Champs", Variety, 7 January 1976 p 46
  2. 1 2 "Box Office Information for Alice's Restaurant". The Numbers. Retrieved February 26, 2012.
  3. ↑ Internet Movie Database
  4. ↑ Zimmerman, Paul D. (September 29, 1969). “Alice's Restaurant's Children.” Newsweek, page 103.
  5. 1 2 Doyle, Patrick (November 26, 2014). Arlo Guthrie looks back on 50 years of Alice's Restaurant. Rolling Stone. Retrieved November 29, 2014.
  6. 1 2 Brown, Jane Roy (February 24, 2008). After Alice's restaurants. The Boston Globe. Retrieved October 24, 2015.
  7. 1 2 Giuliano, Charles (March 27, 2014). Alice’s Restaurant Returns to the Berkshires. Berkshire Fine Arts. Retrieved October 24, 2015.
  8. ↑ James Grady, "Thanksgiving at Alice's Restaurant: The Guthries' American Dream Lives On", Politics Daily, 25.11.2009.
  9. ↑ Arthur Penn (2008). Arthur Penn: Interviews. Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-105-7.
  10. ↑ M. Chaiken and P. Cronin (eds), Arthur Penn Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 1998, p. 65.
  11. ↑ M. Chaiken and P. Cronin (eds), Arthur Penn Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
  12. ↑ Cineaste (December 1993). "Arthur Penn Interview". cineaste (magazine). XX (2). Retrieved 10 April 2014.
  13. ↑ Siskel and Ebert Top Ten Lists. Retrieved April 22, 2014.
  14. ↑ Awards Information for Alice's Restaurant. IMDb. Retrieved April 22, 2014.

External links

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