Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...film, we see Woody Guthrie during his last year. He lies in bed-still, dumb. Arlo comes to talk to him from time to time, even though his father cannot react. All Arlo (and the audience) can do is wonder what goes through Woody's mind...
LIKE Easy Rider, then, Penn's film is full of the spirit of an America lost. But the films couldn't be more different. Rider gives us a hero and hope (Captain America) and a gun-wielding villain (middle America). Alice's Restaurant gives us no hero, no villain and precious little hope...
Also unlike Rider, Restaurant is incredibly close to earth. Grass is smoked, girls are screwed, and motorcycles are raced, but Penn and his wonderful film editor. Dede Allen, do not point at these things as Dennis Hopper does in the Peter Fonda epic. Nor do we get the glamorized, generalized "real-life" performances of Rider in this picture. Arlo is a natural, uneasy, stuttering Arlo-not a hippie-stud (like Fonda) or a hippie-hippie (like Hopper...