Alice's Restaurant (film)

Alice's Restaurant is a 1969 movie based on the song by Arlo Guthrie. The film stars Guthrie in a reenactment of the song. It features a Thanksgiving dinner. I always loved the song, and the movie is really just the song expanded and adapted for film. It's a bittersweet movie for me, bringing back fond memories of my early teen years.

Here's the song, in case you don't remember it:

Here's the movie via Youtube.

The New York Times says, "In Alice's Restaurant, Penn has made a very loving movie, but the loving is not verbalized; it is sung and seen, in sequence after sequence" and closes with this:

Through it all, Arlo maintains amazing grace, which provides both the theme and the continuity for a very original movie whose structural weaknesses couldn't bother me less. With a film as interesting and fine as Alice's Restaurant, structural weaknesses, seen in proper perspective, simply become cinematic complexities to be cherished.

DVD Talk calls it "a casual, laid-back memento of the Woodstock year". Roger Ebert gives it 4 out of 4 stars and calls it "faithful to the spirit of Arlo Guthrie's original recording". Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 67%.