End of the Road

It is hard to imagine a more beautiful movie than Alice's Restaurant. Or a sadder one. Anyone who remembers Arlo Guthrie's rambling, hilarious talking-blues record of a couple of seasons back will probably be surprised by this movie version. All the favorite, funny episodes are still there: the garbage dumping after Thanksgiving dinner, the cops investigating "the scene of the crime" and taking "twenty-seven 8-by-10, colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows," and the Army induction with its "injections, inspections, detections, neglections." But Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) has woven these episodes of laughter into a more sober framework. He has transformed a charming shaggy-dog story into a melancholy epitaph for an entire era.

Restaurant's plot follows the easy, an ecdotal style of the song but sharpens and widens its focus. Arlo (playing himself) is seen singing for his supper of gaseous French pastries at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse and trying to cope with a groupie who announces: "I wanna make it with you 'cause you'll probably get to be an album." By using such figures as Arlo's father Woody and Folk Singer Pete Seeger, Penn establishes a historical continuum. "Seems like Woody's road mighta run through here some time," Arlo says as he lights out to visit his buddies Ray and Alice Brock in Stockbridge, Mass.

That is where Woody's road ends, in front of an old church that Ray (James Broderick) and Alice (Pat Quinn) have converted into a communal dorm for wandering kids. Life seems just about perfect--or "together," as the kids say --but Penn sees destruction all around. Ray and Alice, playing foster parents, bitch away at each other in rivalry for the affections of a reformed junkie named Shelly (Michael McClanatha). Woody lies dying in a Brooklyn hospital of Huntington's chorea, a hereditary affliction of the nervous system that Arlo may not escape. When Woody and Shelly die, there is a funeral of lingering sadness that symbolizes the passing of the whole way of life.

What follows is diminuendo. Ray and Alice remarry and, in a wedding ceremony of empty celebration, realize that the dream is finally and forever dead. In the film's shattering last scene, Alice stands alone on the church steps, her bridal veil blowing in the winter wind as Arlo's voice is heard on the sound track quietly singing the song's refrain: "You can get anything you want /At Alice's Restaurant / 'Ceptin Alice ..."

Penn knows that the humor of a few of the scenes does not contradict, but rather deepens, the tragedy of the whole. As in Bonnie and Clyde, laughter is a kind of ironic counterpoint. The actors, many of them nonprofessionals who perform with repertory-company precision, are constantly framed against autumnal and winter landscapes that give the whole story an aura of aching desolation. Despite a few false steps (like a love scene between Alice and Shelly played with a garage air hose), Alice's Restaurant is one of the best and most perceptive films about young people ever made in the U.S. It is, as they themselves would say, very much together.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.