Word: rider
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
TECHNICALLY Easy Rider is a clumsy first picture. Hopper breaks directorial line in almost every sequence to no valuable effect. Civics' landscapes and wide-angle shots of the two motorcycles crossing the Southwest are quite marvelous; but the LSD sequence is predictable-lots of fish-eye shots, weeping, and intimation of death-and boring, and doesn't do justice to the drug (compare Conrad Rooks' sublime hallucinations in Chappaqua or in any film by Jordan Belson). Hopper also has an irritating editing affectation: when indicating the passage of time he'll cut two frames of the next sequence in twice...
...view the film is poorer for it. Nothing in Easy Rider's endless shots of motorcycles (stolen, as was some of Roger Corona's work in Wild Angels-in which Fonda also starred-from Kenneth Anger's incantatory Scorpio Rising ) matches the groaning ferocity of Steppenwolf's lyrics ("Get the motor running/Shoot out on the highway / Looking for adventure / And whatever comes our way / Hey darling gonna make it happen / Take the world in a love embrace / Fire all of our guns at once and explode into space") and these disjunct moods clash to disengage the viewer...
Hopper's frankly commercial use of rock gives us one more insight into his real sensibility. Easy Rider may be a happy vision, but it's a bourgeois happy vision, concocted with both eyes on the market place. Just listen to how Hopper treated sex, and why: "I knew that Peter and I and the girls we meet would never be seen totally nude in the nude swimming scene, because I wanted to show the over-forty crowd that it is possible to play like innocent children in the nude without getting into sex." In the echo chamber...