ABSTRACT
If Dr. Strangelove heralded a break from the social and political consensus of the postwar era, the film fare of the late 1960s formally recorded the collapse of traditional values. No film marked the social fragmentation of this decade more clearly than Arthur Penn’s adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s musical assault on conformity, Alice’s Restaurant (1969). By the end of the sixties, American society was deeply divided by the combined impact of the civil rights movement, the black power struggle, and a bitterly contested war in Vietnam. As this eventful decade came to a close, several antiestablishment “youth films” raised a challenge to a mainstream culture that had alienated a substantial number of young Americans. One of the most successful of these was the Penn-Guthrie production, which mocked the values held dear by middle-class America. Equally revealing was the Mike Nichols production of The Graduate (1967), which attacked middle-class consumer culture with devastating effect. Analysis of Alice’s Restaurant, with a comparative look at The Graduate for another celluloid critique of 1960s values, will provide insight into the experience of distinct segments of the youth culture, while exposing the underside of the affluent but morally deficient society they objected to.
