Fresh off the enormous success of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, filmmaker Arthur Penn decided it was time to take on an entirely different kind of counterculture hero in 1969 with Alice’s Restaurant, a feature-length adaptation of the already-nearly-feature-length 1967 song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie.
Guthrie, the son of American folk music legend Woody Guthrie, wrote the song, in part, to lampoon his 1965 arrest, which took place the day after Thanksgiving, for littering. Guthrie and some friends had illegally dumped bags of garbage down a cliff near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, after discovering that the dump was closed for the holiday.
According to Guthrie, the arrest at the “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” eventually resulted in his being rejected by the U.S. Army when he was drafted for the Vietnam War, and the song was written in part as a reaction to the absurdity that being arrested for littering could preclude someone from participating in an unpopular and likely illegal war.
Guthrie’s song is a Thanksgiving classic — one of the only popular Thanksgiving songs, in fact — and regularly gets its only radio play of the year on the holiday. The film is less beloved, but is certainly a fascinating artifact of the era, and it’s one that has also found itself a part of the Thanksgiving playlist for a lot of fans.
Of course, it isn’t streaming free and legal. In order to see Alice’s Restaurant, you would have to either own it on home video (it has had VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases over the years), or you can rent or purchase it at digital retailers like Apple, Prime Video, and Fandango At Home.
That said, somebody has uploaded a DVD-quality copy of Alice’s Restaurant to YouTube, and you can see it below.
The movie was distributed by MGM — a company that has historically had some issues with home video and digital distribution. Its financial problems eventually led to the studio being acquired by Amazon. It’s likely that YouTube embed will stop working one of these days, when Amazon finally streams the movie on Prime.
The song — which clocks in at over 15 minutes long — is a talking blues track recorded live, and re-recorded on its thirtieth and fiftieth anniversaries.
Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant features a performance by William Obanhein, the original arresting officer, as himself. Obanhein is an interesting figure in his own right, having been immortalized not only in “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” but also in a number of pieces of art by Stockbridge’s other famous artist-in-residence, Norman Rockwell. Obanhein most famously appeared in the black-and-white image “Policeman With Boys,” which you can see below.
Obanhein is often mistaken for the cop seen in Rockwell’s “The Runaway,” although that was a different officer and the diner in question was not Alice’s restaurant, but a diner in Lee, Massachusetts.
According to a local newspaper clipping that has been posted online, Guthrie and his friends plead guilty and were ordered to pay their fine on the Saturday after Thanksgiving — November 27, 1965 — which makes today the 60th anniversary of their conviction.
