Powerful

Excellent but underrated film

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Having listened to record a few hundred times, I was intrigued to see this movie. It turned out to be a visual representation of the song. The throwing away of the garbage in Stockbridge, the draft physical, the big dinner, and all that. It's a series of vignettes culled from the song. Arlo is really quite good. He has kind of a dizzy look about him. In a kind of Marx Bros. mentality, things fall apart around them but nothing ever seems to get to them. Of course, the most outrageous part is the effort of the police to find evidence against Guthrie and the litterers that shamed the investigation of the Kennedy assassination. It's a fun, relatively unmemorable movie that only means something to us sixties guys.

In "Alice's Restaurant, Arthur Penn exposes the rubbish (that is the correct word here) of aimless aspects of the sixties counterculture without putting down the vitality and importance of playfulness. He does this by posing the intelligent and serious young man Arlo Guthrie and Pat Quine playing Alice against Alice's workshy husband Ray, played a tad heavily by James Broderick, and an aimless community of people skirting life at the former church made restaurant.Director Penn contrasts bright and colourful New England landscape and towns with revolting and ugly icons and rituals of late sixties counterculture. Mr. Penn rightly avoids a big statement by sharing simple experiences interpreted with Guthrie's intelligent good humour. The smallness of the film makes it a great film. An example of this and an expression of the essential kindliness behind the film is the real Officer Obie, Williams J. Obanheim, police chief of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, portraying himself. His Norman Rockwell iconic look (he had posed for the artist who lived in Stockbridge) plays well against the icons of Arlo and his friends.Cinematography by Michael Nibbia is intricate and imaginative. Editing by Dede Allen, one of the most important in cinema history, flows like most of the script by Mr. Penn and gifted screenwriter Venable Herndon. The script is like orchestration of the famous, splendid Arlo song.Production, custom, set design, and other aspects are perfect. This is major and loving effort. Peter Seeger and Lee Hayes indicate the utter seriousness of the time depicted here. Cold, hard images for New York City and austere blue-green scenes in Woody Guthrie's hospital room are simply two indicators of the background. Serious exposure of drug addiction in 1969 when Mr. Penn made this film was accurate, timely, honest, and necessary. This film is not a gloss on a deadly time. I like this movie even more than I like "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Little Big Man", both superb movies.Joni Mitchell's song "Songs to Aging Children Come" is the actual theme song of this marvellous film about a tragic moment in our lives. Emment Walsh has a great scene. I did not much like psychedelic and other countercultural signs and symbols. I used to complain about not knowing how to live as a Danish Modern person in a psychedelic world. My former wife used to go to any concert within two hundred miles that Arlo Guthrie gave. I grew a little tired of him, but I love the stories that inform his life. I like the persona of his sister in interviews. These are serious people who know how serious play is.

I was only five years-old when this film debuted, so the 60s don't hold quite the same magical nostalgic hold on me that they hold for some older folks. I'm sure for many of them, this film was a nice little stroll down memory lane--but for me I mostly found it slow and annoying, though there were many bits and pieces that I liked. Additionally, as an American History teacher, I did appreciate how this was all like a time capsule--with both the good and bad of the era all rolled into one package.The movie purports to be based on real-life situations that occurred to Arlo Guthrie when he was 18. How close to the truth his song "Alice's Restauran" and this movie are is anyone's guess. However, I did appreciate that the film was not a whitewash of the era. While there was a lot of idealism, free love and self-expression, the film also had a very dark side that particularly came out at the end--and was a great way to show that the idealism of the 60s was starting to die a slow death. I know that the Leonard Maltin Guide disliked this downbeat ending, but I liked it--making the movie, in a way, like "Paradise Lost" meets the 1960s. The only problem I had with the ending is that it seemed to drag on way too long and could have benefited from a slight trimming to keep it focused and make it end a bit stronger.As for the funny moments, everything about the littering arrest was pretty funny. Making stacks of police photos of the "horrible crime scene" and then giving all this to the blind judge was pretty absurd! Also how this minor incident resulted in Guthrie's being rejected from the draft was kind of cute (though I wonder just how true that was--if it was, then that's nuts!).Other than the funny and poignant parts at the end about the dark side of the 60s, there wasn't a whole lot I liked about the film. It really seemed more like an aimless home movie--something crowds in the 60s liked (with the success of this film and EASY RIDER, it's pretty self-evident). But today--in the 21st century--I just can't see it making much of a positive impact on most younger viewers and will probably just elicit boredom as well as questions such as "who are Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger?". By the way, for a guy who was no actor, I was impressed with Arlo Guthrie's performance. It was better than you might expect considering he was a folk singer and not an actor. Too bad he didn't have too many credits after this film.

First of all, I have to admit that I did not experience the '60s; I was born long after they were over. My parents grew up in the '60s, so I've learned about that era from them, and from various other sources. But obviously, I can't truly understand what happened. "Alice's Restaurant" is one of the great records of the era. And a really funny one at that.Arlo Guthrie plays himself trying to avoid getting drafted. The police arrest him for having long hair, and the army forces him into a recruiting center. In the recruiting center, they force him to walk around in his underwear. As an act of defiance, he declares: "I wanna see blood 'n' guts 'n' gore 'n' veins! I wanna kill, man!" Of course Arlo's favorite hang-out is Alice Brock's restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. That place could be the embodiment of the whole 1960s.Anyway, "Alice's Restaurant" is nowadays a look back at when the country's youth were fighting for a better future (people who lived through the '60s would probably object to how I said that). And in the Bush era, we really long for that.By the way, I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert when he came to Portland in 1998, and then again in 2004. Both concerts were great.