Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Robert Getchell
Stars: Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Green Bush, Lane Bradbury, Vic Tayback, Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel

Index: The First Thirty.

From a TV movie that prompted an ABC TV show to a feature film that prompted a CBS TV show. However, this time the film is a Martin Scorsese and the show ran for nine seasons. In fact, Alice ran longer than any U.S. sitcom with a female lead until Roseanne passed it in 1996.

Little of that is evident in the film because it isn’t a laugh a minute comedy—adding a laugh track would be a crime against humanity—and there isn’t one central location; Mel’s Diner is that only for the last forty five minutes. This is a drama before it’s a romantic comedy and it’s not a romantic comedy in the romcom sense.

Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar for Best Actress, against tough competition, and she’s the focus throughout. What drew her to the script, after her huge success with The Exorcist, was that it’s the story of a woman who doesn’t have a story beyond being a woman, a wife and a mother. She’s just Alice Hyatt and that was refreshing.

Having found the script, she needed to find a director and asked Francis Ford Coppola who was “new and young and exciting”. He advised her to see Mean Streets, not yet released, and Scorsese was hired, maybe as this is as much about women as that film was about men. The two films play loose cinematically to be close, personal and dangerous, if in different ways.

For instance, the danger here, once we pass the Wizard of Oz inspired prologue, is the clash between Alice’s husband, Donald, and her son, Tommy. The former is an angry man who isn’t averse to violence, though he can be tender as well. The latter listens to Mott the Hoople very loudly and slips salt into his dad’s coffee. We know it won’t end well, but we’re also shocked as it ends. Alice is talking with a friend about living without a man and the phone rings. He’s dead. His truck was in an accident.

So she and Tommy leave Tucson, a stand in for Socorro, New Mexico, and drive to Tucson, now a proxy for Phoenix, on their way to her hometown of Monterey, California, which we now imagine will look like Tucson. Most of the locations have been demolished, sometimes by other buildings that have been demolished. It isn’t easy to find something that’s still there.

They’re in need of income and the only job she’s ever had was as a singer, so she talks to the owners of every bar, club and lounge she can find. The most obviously Scorsese scene in the movie is when she talks to Mr. Jacobs, who doesn’t even have a piano, and breaks down in despair. It’s Jacobs who finds her a gig.

If this sounds episodic, it is, but we do spend a good chunk of time in each episode. It seems unfair to suggest that this is the Harvey Keitel episode, because this is a female-centric movie that passes the Bechdel Test. However, it’s also easy to break it down into the Billy Green Bush section, the Harvey Keitel section and the Kris Kristofferson section. The times in between do feel very much like times in between.

So I guess that this one is the Harvey Keitel episode, because he’s the polite and charming cowboy who tries to chat her up after a song. He plays Ben Eberhardt and he’s younger than Alice but says he doesn’t care. However, as we soon find, he doesn’t care about plenty, which emerges with stunning misogynism, but also a clever camera movement to reflect the truth breaking her perception.

Of course, this doesn’t end well, but it ends. Everything here ends, until it doesn’t, which is the point when Alice knows she’s finally found somewhere that she belongs and feels could be a new home for her and Tommy, even if it isn’t Monterey. Apparently the first cut of the film ran over three hours and, frankly, it could run thirty, as long as it eventually ends as it does. The ending represents Alice’s new reality. The rest is how she gets there.

I haven’t mentioned Jodie Foster yet but it’s because she doesn’t show up until just over an hour in. She’s Doris but prefers Audrey, for no apparent reason and that’s appropriate, given that I’m not sure why she’s even in the movie. Maybe Tommy needed something to do while his mum was navigating through episodes.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s good, though she isn’t the sort of friend for Tommy that Alice is looking for. Her mum’s a hooker and her dad’s long gone, leaving her highly independent and morally flexible. She helps Tommy steal some guitar strings he needs, at her suggestion.

The most telling line comes at the very end, when Alice tells him, “Honey, I think Audrey’s a little mature for you.” Audrey acts like she’s years older than Tommy, but in reality, Foster was eight months younger than Alfred Lutter.

Her character in Smile Jenny, You’re Dead was far older than her years but showed at the end that she was still a child, just one who was able to survive on her own until she didn’t have to any more. That doesn’t happen here. Audrey is even more on her own with her mum than Liberty Cole was without one.

Foster is excellent yet again, but she has few scenes and only one single moment involves a principal cast member not Lutter. That’s her last scene, as she introduces herself to Alice as her mum’s collecting her from a police station.

Lutter has far more opportunity, being a key part of the film from beginning to end. He was apparently hired because he could banter back and forth with Burstyn improvisationally. The scenes in between episodes thrive on that and I wonder if most were made up on the spot.

Similarly, Bush and Keitel both do excellent work but only in brief sections of the film. Kris Kristofferson gets much more to do, as David, a rancher who catches Alice’s eye while she’s working as a waitress at Mel’s Diner.

Well, it’s Mel and Ruby’s Cafe here, but Mel runs the place and he’s played by Vic Tayback, the only actor to continue from film to show. I liked him here, but he’s easily lost behind the waitresses. As Flo, Diane Ladd’s mile a minute mouth happily steals plenty of scenes. Valerie Curtin steals a few too but in a much quieter way as slow, inept Vera. These characters did go on to the show but the actors didn’t go with them. Ladd later joined as Flo’s replacement.

I’ve seen this before and reviewed it back in 2009, but from a different perspective, so Jodie Foster only got a mention in one line, which is not unfair. It doesn’t matter how good you are if your character isn’t that important.

I stand by that review, but I should mention an ambitious twenty second tracking shot that reminds that, as much as this is Burstyn’s film, it’s also recognisably Scorsese’s.