Alice's Restaurant is a 1969 movie adapted from a song by Arlo Guthrie. The song is Guthrie's most famous work, a talking blues based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965. The movie reproduces the events of the song, in addition to other scenes.
The movie is directed and co-written by Arthur Penn and stars Guthrie as himself, Pat Quinn as Alice Brock and James Broderick as Ray Brock, with the real Alice making a cameo appearance. In the scene where Ray and friends are installing insulation, she is wearing a brown turtleneck top and has her hair pulled into a ponytail. In the Thanksgiving dinner scene, she is wearing a bright pink blouse. In the wedding scene, she is wearing a Western-style dress.
Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein ("Officer Obie") played himself in the film version, explaining to Newsweek magazine that making himself look like a fool was preferable to having somebody else make him look like a fool.
The film also features the first film appearance of character actor M. Emmet Walsh, playing the Group W sergeant, and a cameo appearance by Lee Hays, American folksinger and songwriter, playing a reverend at an evangelical meeting.
The movie version of "Alice's Restaurant" was released on August 19, 1969, a few days after Guthrie appeared at the Woodstock Festival.
A soundtrack album for the film was also released by United Artists Records. The soundtrack includes a studio version of the title song, which was originally divided into two parts (one for each album side); a 1998 CD reissue on the Rykodisc label presents this version of the song in full, and adds several bonus tracks to the original LP.
Plot
The movie recounts a true but comically exaggerated Thanksgiving adventure.
Arlo Guthrie (as himself) has attempted to avoid the draft by attending college in Montana. His long hair and unorthodox approach to study gets him in trouble with local police as well as residents. He is thrown out of school, hitch-hiking back East. He first visits his father Woody Guthrie (Joseph Boley) in the hospital, along with singer Pete Seeger (as himself). (Woody Guthrie died in 1967 after a long struggle with Huntington's disease).
Arlo ultimately returns to his friends Alice (Pat Quinn) and Ray Brock (James Broderick) at their home, a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts where they welcome friends and like-minded bohemian types to "crash". Among these are Arlo's school friend Roger (Geoff Outlaw) and artist Shelley (Michael McClanathan), an ex-heroin addict who is in a motorcycle racing club. Alice is starting up a restaurant in nearby Stockbridge. Frustrated with Ray's lackadaisical attitude, she has an affair with Shelley, and ultimately leaves for New York to visit Arlo and Roger. Ray comes to take her home, saying he has invited a "few" friends for Thanksgiving.
The central point of the film is the story told in the song: After Thanksgiving dinner, Arlo and his friends decide to do Alice and Ray a favor by taking several months worth of garbage from their house to the town dump. After loading up a red VW microbus with the garbage, and shovels, and rakes and implements of destruction, they head for the dump. Finding the dump closed for the holiday, they drive around and discover a pile of garbage at the bottom of a short cliff that someone else had placed there. At that point, as mentioned in the song, "...we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down."
The next morning they receive a phone call from "Officer Obie" (Police Chief William Obanhein as himself), who asks them about the garbage. After admitting to littering, they agree to pick up the garbage and to meet him at the police station. Loading up the red VW microbus, they head to the police station where they are immediately arrested.
As the song puts it, they are then driven to the "Scene of the Crime" where, faithful to the song (and to actual events), the police are engaged in a hugely elaborate investigation. At the trial, Officer Obie is anxiously awaiting the chance to show the judge the 27 photos of the "Crime of the Century", when the judge walks in with a seeing-eye dog. In a "typical case of American blind justice," the judge levies a $50 fine, orders them to pick up the garbage, then sets them free. The garbage is eventually taken to New York and placed on a barge, to be taken out and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Arlo has fallen in love with a beautiful Asian girl, Mari-chan (Tina Chen).
Later in the movie, Arlo is called up for the draft, in a surreal depiction of the bureaucracy at the New York City military induction center on Whitehall Street. Because of Guthrie's criminal record for littering, he is first sent to the Group W bench (where convicts wait), then outright rejected as unfit for military service.
Upon returning to the church, Arlo finds Ray and members of the motorcycle club showing home movies of a recent race. Shelley enters, obviously high, and Ray beats him until he reveals his stash of heroin, concealed in some art he's been working on. Shelley roars off into the night on his motorcycle to his death; the next day, Woody dies. Ray and Alice have a hippie-style wedding in the church, and a drunken Ray proposes to sell the church and start a country commune instead, revealing that he blames himself for Shelley's death. The film ends with Alice standing alone in her bedraggled wedding gown on the church steps.
Reception
References
External links
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Arlo Guthrie |
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| Studio albums |
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| Live albums |
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| With Pete Seeger |
Together In Concert (1975, live) · Precious Friend (1982) · More Together Again, Vol. 1 (1994) · More Together Again, Vol. 2 (1994)
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| Compilations |
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| Important songs |
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| Films acted in |
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| Films composed for |
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| Related |
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