Customer Reviews

Alice's Restaurant [VHS]

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I had fun doing a running commentary for this new DVD release which I know you'll enjoy. However, because MGM/UA would not allow our small company to purchase the DVD at a decent wholesale price, they've cut us out from selling the product through our own retail outlet (we can buy it cheaper here at Amazon) where we've been selling our CDs and VHS movies (including Alice's Restaurant) for years. We are boycotting the sale of the DVD until changes can be made. Stick with us and wait. Then buy it here or anywhere. Thanks, Arlo Guthrie

The excellent-quality Alice's Restaurant DVD is a cultural gem! Thanks to audio commentary by Arlo Guthrie himself, Alice's Restaurant merits nomination as the greatest movie ever about the 60s or, for that matter, any time of profound social and spiritual change! What adds human depth to this movie is that many people involved in the real-life drama are here, in the same locations, playing themselves!

The 60s social/intellectual/spiritual divide is illustrated in Alice's Restaurant by this insane question: can anyone who dumps litter be sufficiently moral to help kill people in another land? The social divide of the 60s has additional clarity in Alice's Restaurant because the movie director was in one ideological camp and Arlo Guthrie was in the other! In addition, an extremely valid spiritual dimension is provided to the story because Alice's restaurant was in a church; a fertile and far-reaching symbol! It makes the movie and real-life story into one wonderful (but never utopian) heart-warming adventure!

The movie has an amazing number of dimensions. What amazes most, however, is the Alice's Restaurant song, on which the movie was partly based. It still sounds wonderfully fresh and naïve! It maintains its power because it is not only a celebration of the genuine joys of life, love, and friendship but also an indisputable anthem that fully affirms the great natural value of simply having fun in life when you can `get anything you want'. It seems a totally innocuous, irrelevant song ... yet, that remains its overwhelming strength rather than its weakness. After the movie, how life-affirming and universally joyous an anthem the song becomes!

My hat is off to you Mr. Guthrie! Thank you!

This movie embodies the contrasts of the 60's. It shows the freedom of being young and the joys that accompany it. It also shows the fear of being drafted into a war in which the counterculture was determined to stifle. "Alice" also shows the sensitivity and the integrity that Arlo Guthrie possessed and continues to possess in his 50's. Although this movie is so timely with the issues of the 60's (war, drugs, and nonconformity), it is also timeless because no matter what the decade, or what the issues at hand, everyone is, at one point, the idealistic child (represented by Arlo and friends) and the "Not young but not old" confused, mid to late 20'something adult (represented by Alice and Ray). Both represent phases of life common to all of us. Do not be mistaken, it has its moments of drama and tragedy, but it is ultimately humorous and making a mockery of the establishment that rejected a generation. Arlo is quirky and hilarious. He is a brilliant storyteller, and most would agree that this is his best story of all. A MUST SEE!

This isn't so much a review, but just a question - what's the deal with the "Special R rated version" advertised under "Special features" at the back of the dvd case? When I played the dvd, there was no special r rated version in the features menu. Is this some kind of joke? The irony really struck home when I listened to Arlo's commentary about the limited nature of the sex scenes - "that's all you could show at that time". Anyway, I would have bought the dvd regardless of the bogus extra feature. I wouldn't say its a great movie, but it does really capture the essence and atmosphere of the late sixties (even though Arlo manages to point out some of the inaccuracies of the director's presentation of the hippie life style). Also has some nice autumn scenery of Stockbridge, Mass. And an interesting jam session with Pete Seeger. All in all, a keeper.

I am a folksinger and have known the Guthries for a very long time. I knew Marjorie Guthrie, but not woody because I was just little when he died.
I can tell you that Marjorie Guthrie loved this movie and would be very happy that people are still watching it. Marjorie died of cancer back in the 1980's.
I myself love this movie and have seen it many times. As I'm writing this, the movie is on TV right now. I ran to the computer to see if it's on DVD. I really thought it wasn't out on DVD yet but to my surprise it is and I ordered it right away. This is a movie I will love all my life time and my son too,
who I named ARLO. Please do watch this movie. It's one of the best in movie history.

`Alice's Restaurant', directed by Arthur Penn, following on his great success with `Bonnie and Clyde' is a great bookend to that other 1960's cinematic document, `Easy Rider'. Both movies are less well known for their quality as works of film art as they are for statements of the counter-culture state of mind in the late 1960's.

I saw the movie when it was first released in theaters and I even bought Arlo Guthrie's `Alice's Restaurant' album (his first) when it was first released in 1967. At the time, I was not especially impressed with the quality of the movie; however the thrill of seeing the ceremonial passing of the torch from Woody Guthrie's generation, represented in the flesh by Pete Seeger, to the next generation was really nice, in spite of the irony that Arlo Guthrie was much less a standard-bearer of that torch than the far greater talents such as Bob Dylan, Richard Farina and Phil Ochs. And yet, it was Arlo that managed to capture the spirit of 1960's counterculture dropouts driven less by doctrinal zeal than by simple self-interest.

Like `Easy Rider', `Alice's Restaurant', the movie has a depressing ending, albeit not quite so tragic. If Penn and his collaborators are to be given any credit, it is that they took the sweet little story behind the 15 minute `talking blues' which was the album cut (the full first side of the album of the same name), and expand it into a morality play about great counterculture ambitions and less great drug culture dangers.

The weakest part of the movie may be the fact that at this age, Arlo Guthrie was simply did not have what it took to hold up a major role in a feature length movie. All the heavy lifting in the acting department was done by Pat Quinn as Alice and James Broderick as her husband who, together, were the earth mother and father of a loose band of hippies living, per the song, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As I recall from the newspaper stories of the day, the skeleton story was almost all true, as there was a real Alice and there was a real `Alice's Restaurant', evidenced by pictures of actresses Quinn standing beside the true to live Alice.

The foreground story, the famous Thanksgiving feast, the disposal of the refuse, the call to the draft board, and the segregation of our hero with the other of society's miscreants is funny enough, but from this distance in time, the background story of the failure of Alice and Ray's little commune is much more durable. It shows how fragile `new' value systems can be, when they don't have all the resources or support of mainstream society.

I watch this movie with great nostalgia for a milieu of which I was a part, and a great longing for the fact that like so many great `60's sentiments, they are preserved only in such greatly metamorphosed form to be almost unrecognizable.

An average movie which captures a distinctly admirable, but ephemeral spirit of years gone by.

Very entertaining for 60's enthusiasts-or Guthrie fans, Woody or Arlo. Arlo's humor is laid-back; the (re)action of the Law was so typical of that time; makes me want to go back in time to relive it all, good or bad-this is a cult-classic for every Thanksgiving!

This movie was the catalyst for me to run away to Haight-Ashbury @ 15 and look for the people in it. It is idealistic and hilarious. Haven't seen it in almost 40 years, so it should be interesting!

I re-visited this film the other night (on Thanksgiving) after not having seen it for some years. I remember when it first came out that I had mixed feelings about it and I still do. It's an interesting film (almost too interesting) but not really what I would call enjoyable. As portrayed in the film, Alice's Restaurant was not a particularly fun place to be.

Part of the problem seems to the director's insistence on making the film "relevant" and "meaningful" in the heavy-handed manner that too many Sixties films did. The movie is most successful when following the mood and theme of the song on which it is supposed to be based; much less so when trying to pad out the plot. The Woody hospital scenes are a nice poignant touch, but the bike races are boring and the character of Shelly is just plain annoying. The acting throughout is inconsistent. Arlo Guthrie is likeable but lightweight and flashes his toothy grin once too often. Pat Quinn as Alice comes off best. Officer Obie is a nice touch but many of the rest of the cast seem to be Hollywood versions of very clean hippies wearing the latest fashions straight off the costume rack.

The biggest problem in the film for me is the character of Ray who I find rather sinister. His background is never really explained and he comes across as a kind of cult leader, always going on about "our kids". His source of income is a mystery - he buys the church and sets up the restaurant but has to borrow $80 from Arlo. He's not very nice to Alice but she seems drawn to him. The hippies follow him without question, apparently happy to trade one establishment for another. The film seems unnecessarily dark whenever Ray is on the scene.

I suppose it's interesting to see this film every once in a while, if only because it provides a kind of snapshot of the times. Perhaps not a totally accurate snapshot, but then memories have a way of improving on reality. For me, I think Alice's Restaurant would have been better with more comedy and less forced dramatics. But, after reading some of the other opinions on here, that is obviously a minority view and I expect the usual "unhelpful" votes for stating it. Peace, man!

I did like this movie, although it isn't as much of a masterpiece as they want you to think. With the talk of the draft coming back, this movie gives this new generation of hippies (my generation, a.k.a. the young "kids" into politics and against the current war) a reason to feel there are backed by the older hippie generation. I know the music of Arlo, and enjoy it a lot. Like others have said, the song is a bit better, for it isn't as dramatic. I like to compare this movie to the Graduate, for that is a much more light hearted, 60s drama, though not about the war. All in all, I'd say I may come to own the movie, if I watch it a few more times and enjoy more and more, but I may just keep it in my head to rent again sometime in the future.