★ 6 / 10
Having been unable to convince the draft that
CinemaSerf
Having been unable to convince the draft that some hereditary health condition should exempt him from army service, Argo Guthrie decides to hitch his way to an…
Having been unable to convince the draft that some hereditary health condition should exempt him from army service, Argo Guthrie decides to hitch his way to an old church being re-purposed by “Ray” (James Broderick) and “Alice” (Patricia Quinn) for his last few weeks of freedom. His journey isn’t exactly uneventful, and just about everyone he encounters en route takes him for a long-haired waste of space. When he finally arrives at the commune, a bit bruised, he helps out “Alice” as she puts the finishing touches to her fine dining establishment that sells Boeuf Bourginon, don’t you know. What now ensues is a folk-music enveloped rite of passage for Arlo that he encapsulates in the some quarter of an hour that the title song takes so complete. No, don’t worry - we don’t get the entire song, but it filters through as his escapades and those of his friends see him prosecuted for an early example of fly-tipping; thrown through a plate glass window and on the wrong end of the law on a few occasions - and so we do understand where much of that lyric comes from. Guthrie is an engaging actor here, very much in the young Bobby Dylan vein, and there’s a duet with Pete Seeger for dad Woody (Joseph Boley) that gets the toes tapping. Sadly, though, it has lost much of it’s lustre over time and now comes across as a pretty weakly structured drama that has points to make, but that Guthrie himself hasn’t the gravitas to deliver. At the time, in the USA, it might have resonated with many a youth but now it’s really just an assembly of light-hearted episodes that are enjoyable enough but nothing special as it begins to drag a little too much toward the end. It doesn’t really show off the USA as much of a land of opportunity either and though it has it’s moments, there just weren’t enough of them for me.
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★ 6 / 10
Unexpectedly sombre, harsh, apolitical view of "hippie" life
petrelet
I can almost reproduce the "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" from memory, but I never saw this film back in the day or since. I just watched it, and it was quite…
I can almost reproduce the "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" from memory, but I never saw this film back in the day or since. I just watched it, and it was quite a surprise. It has a tone which is quite alien to Arlo's own tone as a performer at the time. Arlo sang back then as a cheerful, confident comic voice with a political subtext a millimeter below the surface, rallying the movement. The film is dark and depressing in many spots, and in the other spots it is really a scathing portrait of Arlo and (male) hippiedom as selfish privileged irrelevant sexist jerks (truthfully there was a lot of this), isolated in a land of violent intolerant yahoos.
(Which means, I suppose, that most people in America in 2017 will find it relevant, since they can enjoy the negative caricatures of their enemies as long as they are willing to ignore the negative caricatures of themselves. This continued relevance is part of why I rated it as high as I did!)
Jarred by all this, I looked up the film afterwards on Wikipedia and discovered that Arlo had nothing to do with the script, which was basically Arthur Penn's work. (On the other hand, he decided to act in it!) There are more parallels with "Bonnie and Clyde", considering both as crime movies, than you would think! There are a lot of notable editorial decisions, such as:
So far as we can tell, the movie Arlo has few political beliefs, and wants to get out of the draft by any possible means just because he doesn't want to go.
The movie starts off with Arlo fighting the draft by trying to make the Black clerk's day miserable with his snarky answers.
The whole movie is framed within the months of Woody Guthrie's dying of Huntington's chorea (displaced in time, btw).
To bring down the tone further, Shelly, a heroin-addicted friend of Arlo's, is invented and treated as pitiable and doomed.
Ray Brock is portrayed as sexist, verbally abusive toward Alice, and verbally and physically abusive toward Shelley. (Women in general have little to say or do in this movie except sleep with the male characters. Alice is portrayed as basically reacting ineffectually to the chaos around her.)
Although the title song was sung by the real-life Arlo as a rallying cry for anti-war and anti-draft mass action, none of this comes into the film at all.
As an illustration of how this comes together, let's look at the key scene where Arlo and company, having found that the town dump is closed on Thanksgiving and they can't dump their microbusful of garbage there, find a bridge over a garbage-strewn streambed and throw all their garbage down there. Is it just age, or the passage of years, that makes me say, "Where do you guys get off throwing your crap in that stream?!" We then see that a comic yokel woman driving by witnesses this, is horrified, and calls the local police. Who does Penn want us to sympathize with here? Possibly we are supposed to just feel superior to everyone. Frankly I think the police chief had the last laugh in portraying himself in this movie, possibly realizing that most people, left and right, are glad he found out who illegally disposed of that rubbish.
The movie ends with the newly-married Alice standing all alone in her wedding dress for an extended take, possibly just reflecting on the miserable world she lives in and the miserable people in it. I don't think the sixties were that hopeless a period, but Penn possibly wasn't the guy to find out where the hope was.
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The Real Synopsis: Arlo goes into Alice's Restaurant, and she asks him if he'd like a pickle sandwich? To which Arlo replies, "I don't wanna pickle. I just wanna ride on my motorcycle ...."