fredupchurch I remember like it was last week. We all went to the old Visualite Theater in Charlotte and saw it. I have nearly no memory of it at all, except the song and Arlo G. singing and the Woody characterI recall nothing else at all about the plot or how it was directed.I just stumbled across the movie watching TCM.Next Sunday ! plan to ask our minister to re-apply our vows. Wife and I have been through a lot of stress and uncertainty lately.

afhick This is such a beautiful movie. In some ways, Arthur Penn was truly the cinematic voice of the '60s, at least in America. The decade was a mass of contradictions, and, no, I don't think I'm the first to say that. In the face of Vietnam, racism, and political division, young people everywhere suddenly pulled together, until drugs pulled them apart. The casualties weren't all on the battle fields of Southeast Asia, as Penn and Herndon's screenplay aptly demonstrates. Comedy and tragedy go hand in hand in this adaptation of Arlo Guthrie's simple-minded (yet edgy) song. I can still recall the chill I felt at Shelly's funeral--"Songs for Aging Children," indeed! But this is really Alice and Ray's story. Drugs may have been the Trojan Horse that ultimately destroyed the movement, but the sexual revolution put the troops in disarray. It's fine to say that we are free, even in marriage, but somebody always suffers. The iconic final scene, of Alice in her wedding dress standing at the church door, is a haunting reminder of the ambivalence we all felt at the end of the '60s. And what a memorable performance from Pat Quinn!

Woodyanders Arlo Guthrie's hilariously mordant 20 minute story song gets adopted into an affably whimsical, episodic, occasionally funny and ultimately quite downbeat and sobering free-form feature by director Arthur Penn that astutely captures the key issues and concerns of the 60's hippie counterculture: dodging the draft, smoking grass, getting hassled by the pigs, being persecuted by grossly intolerant, narrow-minded, repressive straight conformist squares, trekking all over the country to find your true self, and defying everyday social conventions so you can do your own thing, man. The rambling, just barely there plot centers on the winningly droll, breezy and irreverent Guthrie's pilgrimage through the counterculture, a bizarre, eventful, eye-opening journey of self-discovery that reaches its peak when Arlo gets arrested for illegally dumping trash, thus making Arlo ineligible for wartime service in the army due to his disreputable status as an unrehabilitated criminal (the scenes at the army center are riotous, with M. Emmet Walsh in a gut-busting early role as the gruff Group W sergeant whose staccato motormouth way of talking renders everything he says incomprehensible).Police chief William Obanheim appears as himself and proves to be a hugely likable good sport by allowing himself to be the endearingly humbled recipient of a few right-on japes made about uptight authority figures. "Glen and Randa" 's Shelley Plimpton has a nice cameo as a cute groupie who hits on Arlo at a party. The film's precise, clear-eyed portrait of the painfully gradual disintegration of flower power idealism and the cynicism and disillusionment that followed in its wake nowadays seems all too grimly true and prescient, with the volatile relationship between vulgar, boorish, obnoxious swinger James Broderick and his frustrated, irritated wife Pat Quinn (they play Ray and Alice Brock, the owners of the titular restaurant) brilliantly reflecting the turbulence and capriciousness of the period. Somewhat erratic and uneven, with a shaky tone that uneasily shifts between comedy and drama, this quirky, laid-back, naturalistic historical curiosity piece provides a lyrical and poignant time capsule of the 60's that for all its admitted imperfections nonetheless remains haunting and effective.

JoeytheBrit If Alice's Restaurant were to be made today it would most likely be filmed in a much grainier, true-to-life fashion, cinema verite wed to the modern taste for close-ups and hand-held camera. It's a style that adds an immediacy to the subjects that it films – and that is something that is badly lacking from this film. Alice's Restaurant stands now as nothing more than a curio, failing completely to capture or convey any sense of how life was like for the draft-dodging members of America's counter-culture. The best films that set themselves up as a form of social document succeed because they always make the era they have captured come alive; they give you a taste and a feel so true to the times that it is almost tangible. Alice's Restaurant simply points the camera at a group of people who possess ill-defined motivation and an almost complete lack of direction: change the hairstyles and the clothes and what takes place on screen could be taking place anywhere at any time in the past fifty years.Arlo Guthrie is no actor, but he's actually quite good in this because you do feel that, while he's obviously acting, he's also trying to be himself and so you get some insight into the man. He's invited to have sex by four different women in this film which is a bit of a stretch to be honest, but other than that he's entirely believable, despite lacking much presence on the screen. Patricia Quinn exudes an earthy vitality as Alice, while James Broderick as her husband Ray seems strangely at odds with the rest of the cast. Maybe it's his age or the cowboy-ish clothes, which make him look something like a good ol' boy, but he never really seems to fit in and fails to convince as the kind of man to whom Alice would be married.For all its counter-culture credentials the film, and its characters, ultimately resort to the most conventional of social traditions. The Brocks live in an old church, long abandoned by most of its ageing congregation, and seek to salvage their relationship by getting married once again while, at their reception, Ray drunkenly bemoans the gradual dispersion of their friends, with whom he wishes to found a commune. That's love, marriage, family and friendship,themes that, while not wholly exclusive from the social group the film examines, nevertheless make an unlikely topic. Maybe that explains why, like most of the rest of us, the hippie generation have today turned into their middle-class suburbanite parents.