Word: arlo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from the word go, Alice's Restaurant is Arthur Penn's movie, not Arlo's. (In addition to directing, Penn co-wrote the screenplay with Venable Herndon.) The director's control becomes clear very early in the picture, where he gives us the first of several scenes set in Arlo's father's hospital room...
...anything you want at Alice's Restaurant..." goes Arlo's now legendary song, which is both the inspiration and structural framework of the film. And you can. Alice and Ray, the couple that sets up home in a Stockbridge, Massachusetts church as the film begins, have everything: shelter and food and grass aplenty. And when Arlo and his friends, the misplaced and the homeless of American kids, come up to Stockbridge, they know there will be a home, sustenance, and love waiting for them...
...middle of Stockbridge, but it collapses in a marital spat between the Brocks. Shelly, a guy in the group who likes motorcycles, art and heroin, kicks the smack habit only to revert to it later on when he discovers that he can't have Alice for his very own. Arlo beats the draft only to realize that "the good things in [his] life seem to come out of not doing what [he] doesn't want to do." What does Arlo want to do? He doesn't know...
...Alice's Restaurant , however, is not a film erupting with death and disaster. It is, on the surface anyway, the story of how Arlo gets busted on a ridiculous littering charge in Stockbridge and later discovers that the charge will exempt him from military responsibilities to the United States. Like the Flatt and Scruggs' banjo music that underscores Bonnie and Clyde, Arlo's song of the "Alice's Restaurant Massacre" gives an essentially tragic movie the look of a comedy...
...Arlo's father, needless to say, was Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, now dead, was one of the giant figures of the Bonnie and Clyde era of American history. As a depression folksinger-songwriter, he was both social critic and super-patriot. During the last fifteen years of his life, a congenital nerve disease paralyzed, silenced and slowly killed him. (The same disease could hit Arlo in his thirties...