Maverick film director Arthur Penn passed away today. While Bonnie and Clyde usually gets most of the attention when talking about Penn, he made a number of other fine films, including the all too rarely screened The Chase, the 70s film noir classic Night Moves, and Alice's Restaurant, starring Arlo Guthrie. Alice's Restaurant suffers from its drifting, episode-driven narrative, and for my particular cinematic tastes its satire strays too far from realism to adequately ground the film in contemporary political questions (it was 1969 after all). But the snowy funeral scene, with Tigger Outlaw singing Joni Mitchell's "Song to Aging Children," has always struck me as a deeply moving portrait of fading 60s countercultural hopes - in its own way just as powerful as the murder of Wyatt and Billy the Kid at the end of Easy Rider.
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