Introduced by Nat Segaloff

Segaloff is a Los Angeles-based writer whose most recent book is Arthur Penn: American Director. A book signing will follow the film.

With the draft decimating the ranks of the young during the sixties, dodging military service was a national pastime. Arlo Guthrie's rambling ballad, “The Alice's Restaurant Massacree,” became a how-to tale for the peace-loving counterculture. Penn's wistful film version retains the folksy simplicity of the original tune while inserting Arlo's quirky observations as narrator of his own follies. The mother-to-all Alice (Pat Quinn) and her hippie hubby Ray (James Broderick) establish a commune in a converted church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (the very town where Penn resided, along with Norman Rockwell) where artists and dropouts, folkies, and just plain folks congregate. After a huge Thanksgiving dinner, Arlo (himself) is assigned to dispose of the trash; his subsequent arrest for littering makes this young peacenik unfit for military duty. Using a mostly amateur cast of flower children, Alice's Restaurant has an incense-tinged naturalism that wafts with authenticity. And at its center is not Arlo but Alice herself, desirable, compassionate, and tragic as she watches this beautiful, generational moment disappear.