Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Restaurant. Or a sadder one. Anyone who remembers Arlo Guthrie's rambling, hilarious talking-blues record of a couple of seasons back will probably be surprised by this movie version. All the favorite, funny episodes are still there: the garbage dumping after Thanksgiving dinner, the cops investigating "the scene of the crime" and taking "twenty-seven 8-by-10, colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows," and the Army induction with its "injections, inspections, detections, neglections." But Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) has woven these episodes of laughter into a more sober framework. He has transformed a charming...
What follows is diminuendo. Ray and Alice remarry and, in a wedding ceremony of empty celebration, realize that the dream is finally and forever dead. In the film's shattering last scene, Alice stands alone on the church steps, her bridal veil blowing in the winter wind as Arlo's voice is heard on the sound track quietly singing the song's refrain: "You can get anything you want /At Alice's Restaurant / 'Ceptin Alice...
Penn knows that the humor of a few of the scenes does not contradict, but rather deepens, the tragedy of the whole. As in Bonnie and Clyde, laughter is a kind of ironic counterpoint. The actors, many of them nonprofessionals who perform with repertory-company precision, are constantly framed against autumnal and winter landscapes that give the whole story an aura of aching desolation. Despite a few false steps (like a love scene between Alice and Shelly played with a garage air hose), Alice's Restaurant is one of the best and most perceptive films about young people ever...
...want a continuity of beautiful pictures and beautiful movement," insisted Photographer Gordon Parks about his first feature film, The Learning Tree. "I try to start each scene with a beautiful still photo and end each scene with a beautiful still photo." Indeed, there are many images of startling beauty in Parks' film, like the dappled summer light shining through the trees on a country lane. The Learning Tree's major problem is not with pictures but with people...
Parks' meticulous photographic direction (executed by an excellent cameraman, Burnett Guffey, who shot Bonnie and Clyde) only seems to underscore all these melodramatics, lending every character and scene an extra edge of unreality. His shimmering imagery creates a world of benign memory but imperfect drama, in which black is just too beautiful...