On October 24, Arlo Guthrie announced he was retiring after a fifty-year-plus career due to poor health. To say goodbye, today’s MOTD is the movie adaptation of his most famous song, in which Arlo stars as himself and which was co-written and directed by Arthur Penn.
Although it tells a great story, Guthrie’s delightfully clever, discursive, and satirical anti-war song was about 20 minutes long, so Penn and co/screenwriter Venable Herndon had to invent a narrative to surround Guthrie’s original tale of what happens to a convicted litterbug when he is called up for the draft.
Unfortunately, whereas Guthrie's story was light and humorous (even though it had a serious point), Penn and Herndon decided to surround it with a lot of glum, mopey seriousness about the unhappy marriage of the song and movie’s titular Alice and a heavy-handed sermonizing about the death of sixties idealism (a theme Penn would revisit again with an equally heavy hand in his 1981 film Four Friends). The result is not much fun nor particularly insightful and comes nowhere near capturing the happy if pointed spirit of the original song and in fact seems to go out if it’s way to dampen it.
You can’t get everything you want in this Alice’s Restaurant, but you do get to watch Arlo, who is an appealing screen presence, and you do get to hear the song, even if you have to slog through a lot of muck to get to it.
