Arthur Penn's ALICE'S RESTAURANT (American Revival)

Music Box — Friday, Midnight and Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
A quirky little movie, loosely based on a quirky song. As the 1960's were coming to a close, Arlo Guthrie and Arthur Penn had their collaborative fingers on the pulse of the counterculture. For both men this was also the height of their popularity, with Penn fresh off of 1967's taboo breaking BONNIE AND CLYDE, and Guthrie's 1967 song and album with the same title as the movie having become a defining symbol of the anti-Vietnam war movement. But where that song had a catchy ragtime backbeat to make tuning in and dropping out seem like a whole lot of fun, the movie catches the darker side of the alternative lifestyle. Not without its moments of joy, the multiple, mostly fictional plot lines include a 13 year-old runaway groupie who hits on Arlo so she can add him to her collection, the death of a talented young artist named Shelly from drug addiction, and the emotional breakdown of a battered wife. Sure, we get the silly play about how an arrest for littering ends up saving Guthrie from being drafted (this part of the story is true), but the power of this film lies in its depiction of tragedies. In one scene, the wintertime funeral of the young Shelly is accompanied only by the sound of a song by Joni Mitchell, who also appears on-screen. As it begins, the camera slowly tracks past the cemetery, shaking slightly as if we are watching from a car driving on the other side of the fence, at a remove from the characters that are spread throughout the cemetery as snow falls. As we travel downhill to catch a glimpse of the grave and casket, the camera lifts higher as if we're just passing them by, keeping our distance. We do get a series of close-ups to end the scene, but these only reveal a numb makeshift family, watching as one of their own is buried. No one talks, and no one touches; all are left as singular people, separately pondering whether their carefree existence has been a terrible mistake. The sadness in this scene is echoed in the film's final shot, when the camera drives away again. The titular Alice is standing alone on the porch of the church where she and her husband have played parents to ragtag love children, staring blankly towards a future that could have been. Penn understood that the Summer of Love was already a memory, and the revolution had not been a success. (1969, 111 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info