Reel Classics: Alice’s Restaurant

Thanksgiving is upon us, and today our Reel Classic is Alice’s Restaurant, star­ring Arlo Guthrie.  As I am sure many of you know, the film was based on the song Alice’s Restaurant Massacree released in 1967.  The song was a sto­ry about a Thanksgiving vis­it with his friends Ray and Alice, who lived in an old church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  Many folks had been invit­ed to this cel­e­bra­tion and as a good deed, Arlo and his friend Roger offer to take a large pile of garbage to the dump in Arlo’s VW bus.  Unbeknownst to Arlo and Roger, the pub­lic dump was closed on Thanksgiving Day, and they end­ed up throw­ing the garbage over the side of a hill, where they saw some oth­er garbage had been dumped.  What they did­n’t know was that there was a cou­ple pass­ing by who wit­nessed this ter­ri­ble event car­ried on by a cou­ple of hip­pies and called the police (Officer Obie). 

After an inves­ti­ga­tion Officer Obie finds an enve­lope with a name on it and tracks down Arlo at Ray and Alice’s.  He and Roger are arrest­ed for lit­ter­ing and put in jail.  As part of his exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tion Officer Obie has tak­en imprints of foot­prints and col­lect­ed mul­ti­ple pic­tures of the alleged offense to present as evi­dence in the “tri­al.”  However, it turns out that the judge is blind and can­not see the “evi­dence” and fines the boys $25 each. 

As the song goes on, we learn how this “crim­i­nal” charge impacts Arlo when he has to appear for an exam when he is draft­ed.  The song is over 18 min­utes long and is the first side of the album.  Arthur Penn, the direc­tor of Alice’s Restaurant, was inter­viewed in 1971 by a writer for the New York Times.  He said, “I heard a record and said, ‘That’s a movie.’  I did­n’t know what shape it would take.  It seemed so active and cin­e­mat­ic.  It took on images very quickly.” 

Penn had just direct­ed the very suc­cess­ful Bonnie and Clyde and said he want­ed to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing that did­n’t have vio­lence as part of the human con­di­tion.  He want­ed to depict the coun­ter­cul­ture of the sixties—flower chil­dren, liv­ing in com­munes, and the rebel­lion against author­i­ty.  He saw the film depic­tion of Guthrie’s song as the per­fect vehicle. 

Arlo Guthrie was only 22 years old when the film was released.  The album from which the song came was his ini­tial release.  The song pro­pelled him to fame and with­in two years of its release he had played the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall.  The movie just added to his fame.

The movie expands upon Arlo’s adven­tures and includes some insight into Ray and Alice’s rela­tion­ship as well as Arlo’s rela­tion­ship with his ail­ing father, Woody Guthrie.  Pete Seeger appears in the film dur­ing a vis­it by Arlo to the New York hos­pi­tal where Woody has been for some time.  They sing a cou­ple of Woody’s songs to him as he lies in his hos­pi­tal bed (“The Pastures of Plenty” and “The Car Song”).  Woody Guthrie suf­fered from Huntington’s dis­ease, a genet­ic dis­or­der that he inher­it­ed from his moth­er. Arlo spent a good part of his life not know­ing whether he, too, would suf­fer from it.  Woody Guthrie spent the last years of his life in a hospital. 

The film also expands upon the Thanksgiving gath­er­ing of folks at Ray and Alice’s.  Hippies and bik­ers make their appear­ance for the com­mu­nal gath­er­ing.  The sto­ry is based upon actu­al events in Arlo’s his­to­ry, and when the real Officer Obie (William Obanhein) learned of the movie he insist­ed that he play him­self.  He stat­ed, “If any­one is going to make a fool out of me, it might as well be me!”  Judge James Hannon also played him­self in the movie.  The actu­al Alice and Ray also appear in the film as extras.

One of the fun­ni­est scenes takes place when Arlo reports for his phys­i­cal exam for the draft.  He is in a room­ful of folks and then finds him­self placed on the “Group W Bench” with oth­er con­victs because of his con­vic­tion.  To quote Arlo from the lyrics of his song: “And I—I walked over to the—to the bench there—and there is—there is, Group W’s where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after com­mit­ting your spe­cial crime. An’... there was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly-lookin’ peo­ple on the bench there.‎ Mother-rap­ers, father-stab­bers, father-rapers!”

The film also focus­es on the rela­tion­ship between Ray and Alice.  They had dif­fi­cul­ties in their rela­tion­ship and includes an affair she had with one of the vis­i­tors.  They end­ed up get­ting divorced before the com­ple­tion of the film.  The film depicts these rela­tion­ship strug­gles.  It also touch­es on the death of one of the friends killed in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent.  There is a pow­er­ful scene in the film depict­ing the gath­er­ing of the friends at the gravesite and includes an uncred­it­ed Joni Mitchell per­form­ing “Songs to Aging Children Come.” 

Upon its release the reviews for Alice’s Restaurant were mixed.  Newsweek described it as “the best of a num­ber of  remark­able new films which seem to ques­tion many of the tra­di­tion­al assump­tions of estab­lish­ment America.”  Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune list­ed it as the third best film of 1969. 

The New York Times review stat­ed, “In Alice’s Restaurant, Penn has made a very lov­ing movie, but the lov­ing is not ver­bal­ized; it is sung and seen, in sequence after sequence... Through it all, Arlo main­tains amaz­ing grace, which pro­vides both the theme and the con­ti­nu­ity for a very orig­i­nal movie whose struc­tur­al weak­ness­es could­n’t both­er me less. With a film as inter­est­ing and fine as Alice’s Restaurant, struc­tur­al weak­ness­es, seen in prop­er per­spec­tive, sim­ply become cin­e­mat­ic com­plex­i­ties to be cherished.”

Roger Ebert wrote “Arthur Penn’s “Alice’s Restaurant” is good work in a minor key. It isn’t a great film, but you nev­er get the feel­ing that it want­ed to be. You sense that Penn achieved what he set out to do: to make a relaxed, unstud­ied por­trait of some friends, and some months in their lives, and some births, deaths and mar­riages. . . To this degree, he has been faith­ful to the spir­it of Arlo Guthrie’s orig­i­nal recording.”

The old church fea­tured in the film still exists today.  In 1991 Arlo Guthrie pur­chased the prop­er­ty and began restor­ing it—turning it into a com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter.  In a 2017 inter­view Guthrie said, “Not only have we been steadi­ly restor­ing it, but we actu­al­ly re-con­se­crat­ed it as a church (ours is an inter-faith church and an edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion). So we con­tin­ue to have ser­vices as one would expect.” Other events include an ongo­ing music series, a fundrais­er for folks deal­ing with Huntington’s Disease, and an annu­al Thanksgiving dinner. 

In a Rolling Stone inter­view in 2014 Guthrie was asked about the tra­di­tion of Alice’s Restaurant Massacree on Thanksgiving.  He stat­ed  “I think it’s just one of those fun­ny, crazy coin­ci­dences that you have an event that takes place on Thanksgiving; there­fore it becomes asso­ci­at­ed with the hol­i­day. If I go back and look at the hits to the web­site for exam­ple, they will spike one day a year. I always thought, “Hey if they’re gonna play one song of yours on the radio one day a year, it might as well be the longest one you wrote!”

In 1969, the movie grossed over six mil­lion dol­lars and was the 23^rd high­est-gross­ing film of the year.  It received an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Best Director (Arthur Penn).

Essentially, Alice’s Restaurant is an actu­al chap­ter out of Arlo Guthrie’s real life.  As life does, it includes hap­pi­ness, sad­ness, love, fear and death.  And, as in most lives, there is a touch of the bizarre.  Again, from Arlo Guthrie in the Rolling Stone inter­view:  “To have what hap­pened to me actu­al­ly hap­pen and not be a work of fic­tion still remains amaz­ing.  It’s an amaz­ing set of crazy cir­cum­stances that reminds me of an old Charlie Chaplin movie. It’s slap­stick. I mean, who gets arrest­ed for lit­ter­ing? And who goes to court and finds them­selves before a blind judge with pic­tures as evi­dence? I mean, that’s crazy!  And then to be reject­ed from the mil­i­tary because I had a lit­ter­ing record? I mean, those events were real.”

And again, from Roger Ebert: “For the most part Alice’s Restaurant is a warm and alive film. You can feel Penn try­ing to por­tray a lifestyle rather than a plot with char­ac­ters in it. He wants to express the spir­it of the church Alice and Ray lived in, and the com­mu­ni­ty they presided over. And he does it pret­ty well. . . This is a new feel­ing in American movies; it’s good to have it.”

 The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) rates Alice’s Restaurant at 6.2 out of 10.  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Critics Score of 63% and an Audience Score of 59%.  In search­ing my Roku device the only site I could find for free stream­ing was on YouTube.  Also, unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Clark County Public Library does not have a copy on the shelf (though I feel cer­tain they will obtain one if you ask). 

As a spe­cial treat for Thanksgiving,   I am offer­ing a link to the song itself along with the trail­er. I hope you enjoy it!

Information for this Reel Classic review was gath­ered from Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Wikipedia.

I’ll be back soon with the next Reel Classic, but before I leave you with the trail­er below, let me remind you that if you enjoy these clas­sic movies, please join me on the sec­ond Tuesday of each month at 6:00 PM at the Clark County Public Library for “Ron Kibbey’s Comedy Classics.”  I present a clas­sic com­e­dy film, usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by a vin­tage car­toon.  Popcorn and drinks are pro­vid­ed.  More infor­ma­tion about the next film is avail­able on the library’s web­site and Facebook page, as well as the WinCity Voices Facebook page.