Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant

Alice’s Restaurant by Arthur Penn is a good work in a minor key. It isn’t great, but you never get the impression that it wants to be. You feel Penn achieved this: a loose; unselfconscious portrait of some friends and several months in their lives; some births, deaths and marriages.

In this much he has been faithful to Arlo Guthrie’s original recording. A higher pressure film would have been unseemly. In fact, you almost wish the rudimentary stabs at a plot had been left out. “Alice’s Restaurant” is at its best when Arlo is on the road, going to college, hitchhiking, playing his guitar, getting drafted, taking his army physical, going to see his friends Ray and Alice and things like that.

But it’s not as loose and confident in some scenes involving Alice’s love life and her relationship with Ray. I guess Alice (played by the appealing Pat Quinn) is an Earth mother. She folds lost souls to her bosom and tries for a transfusion of life force. Sometimes she succeeds and this far she exudes a healthy sensuality; generosity of spirit.

But then along comes Ray, and they fight with each other, and their relationship turns ambiguous on us. What are we supposed to think? That she’s two timing him? What does Ray think? Penn doesn’t make it clear which doesn’t help matters any.

There also occurs an objection for me at least with the decision to bring Arlo’s father Woody into the film as a character. Woody (played by Joseph Boley) is shown in the last stages of the nerve disorder Arlo may develop someday himself this hits too close to home but we can accept it as part of the film’s basic honesty.

The scenes themselves aren’t handled very well though. Woody nods tries to smile Arlo and his mother visit the bedside one afternoon Pete Seeger comes to play for his friend but it’s all too staged somehow. You know they were trying to do the scenes about Woody quietly and tastefully, but still you feel uneasy about them.

These are minor objections. “Alice’s Restaurant” is mostly a warm, alive film. You can feel Penn trying to show a life style instead of a plot with characters in it. He wants to get across the spirit of the church Alice and Ray lived in, and the community they presided over. And he does that pretty well we’re reminded of some of the gentle scenes in “Bonnie and Clyde,” like the one in the Okie camp, and the time in the gas station when they meet C. W. Moss. This is a new feeling in American movies; it’s good to have it.

Arlo Guthrie himself is also good to have around quiet, open and good on camera why there should be any professional actors at all escapes me sometimes his camera presence is so natural that it contrasts with their tightness (especially James Broderick as Ray), and “Alice’s Restaurant” ultimately becomes a synthesis of Arlo’s spirit and Arthur Penn’s tactful filming abilities.

Watch Alice’s Restaurant For Free On Gomovies.