It's nearly Thanksgiving, so it's only appropriate to talk about the hippie cult classic Alice's Restaurant which also takes place during Thanksgiving time. Plus there's nudity, so there is a lot to be thankful for in this comedy classic. This is going to be one Hippie Hotties to be grateful for!
Arthur Penn directed this film based on a song by Arlo Guthrie. A lot of movies were made based on songs, but thankfully "Alice's Restaurant" is a really long song, so there is so much to mine material from. You can listen to the entire 18-minute song here if you would like:
The cool thing about this song adaptation is that the musician, Arlo Guthrie, actually stars in this journey. He's not half bad either! He plays himself as a draft dodger who attends college in Montana to avoid the war. His long hair and hippie clothes make him a target of local harassment, so he drops out of college and hitchhikes back home to the East Coast.
The film goes on a series of adventures! He crashes with some hippie friends before finding his pals who own a church. Their names are Ray and Alice, a couple that has pretty major ups and downs throughout the film. Alice, however, is played by Pat Quinn and she's the titular Alice from the title.
She is planning on opening a restaurant where all the hippies are welcome to eat home-cooked meals. She is absolutely wonderful in the film and it's a shame that she never goes nude.
Then comes Thanksgiving with all of his hippie pals in the weird church that they bought. It's a huge, hopeful, drunken feast with a bunch of shaggy-haired friends. It's one far-out meal!
After the dinner, Arlo and his friends want to pay the couple back somehow, so they take out a lot of their trash to the dump. They load up a VW bus with garbage and drive to the dump, but the dump is closed for the holidays. What to do with all of that garbage? They find a pile of garbage by a cliff and pile theirs on top of it.
That seems pretty harmless, right? Nope! The next morning a police chief asks them about all of this glittering. He asks to speak to them about cleaning up their garbage, but when they head down to the station they are all arrested.
After this whole police debacle, Arlo is called up for the draft. Oh no! We get to watch him try to make himself seem unfit for duty. He tries to be diagnosed as a homicidal maniac, but that doesn't work. Now he has a police record, though, so that winds up coming in handy. He isn't drafted after all!
He goes back to the church where Ray and Alice have a big hippie wedding. Her new husband is drunk and grieving over the death of a friend, despite just getting married, so he suddenly announces that he wants to sell the church and start a commune.
Alice is basically like: ummmm, what? So am I upon this recent rewatch. What's this guy doing?! He gets everyone riled up about his idea and they all leave. Alice is left standing alone in her bohemian wedding gown at the church steps which is a sad, haunting ending in my personal opinion.
This shows the ways in which women at that time - even in progressive hippie communities - were still expected to just go along with whatever their husbands wanted. And the film ends on that - on Alice, who is known and respected mostly for her cooking. The jingle plays with the lyrics "you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant", but we are struck knowing that Alice herself doesn't get whatever she wants. Wow. What a film!
The most memorable scene in the movie from a skin perspective is when hippie girl Shelley Plimpton chats with Arlo in her bohemian crash pad. She gets totally nude and shows off her itty bitties and long hair while talking to him about bands and politicians that she likes.
Shelley Plimpton was the poster child for flower children. She even starred in the hit hippie musical Hair before going nude in this film and again in 1971's Glen and Randa which is a post-apocalyptic retelling of Adam Eve.
Arthur Penn had previously directed the hit film Bonnie Clyde and he allegedly started working on this screenplay almost as soon as he was finished with that film. Arthur Penn was nominated for an Academy Award for this film which had a positive critical reception. The film was released in 1969 and it even appeared at the Woodstock Festival! How hippie can it really get?
One might wonder what the point of the film was. It does seem to ramble in that similar, bohemian style that other movies of the time, like Easy Rider, do. That being said, this movie does it all a lot better with much clearer plot points. The actual point of the film is all in the subtext. It's in what isn't said.
Much like Hair, the Vietnam War is looming in the backdrop of every single scene. It's on all of these characters' minds and yet it isn't talked about all that much.
Everyone does their best to carry on despite the horrors of war and the knowledge that many of their friends and family won't return once they are drafted. On the film's themes, Penn had said in a 1971 interview: "I wanted to show that the US is a country paralyzed by fear, that people were afraid of losing all they hold dear to them. It's the new generation that's trying to save everything".
Well said, Penn! This Thanksgiving, rewatch Alice's Restaurant and have yourself a groovy time. At the very least, you can feast your eyes on Shelly Plimpton!
