Sean Burns
The story of a widowed torch singer driving across the Arizona deserts, trying to raise her twelve-year-old son and looking for love in all the wrong places, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore doesn’t sound like a logical follow-up to Mean Streets, which was entirely the point. Warner Bros. head John Calley had been itching to work with Ellen Burstyn again after The Exorcist and was hot on Robert Getchell’s screenplay, a throwback to 1950s “women’s pictures” but updated for the age of second-wave feminism and the ERA. Francis Ford Coppola recommended Scorsese to Burstyn, and when the actress asked the director of the brutishly masculine Mean Streets what exactly he thought he knew about women, Scorsese famously answered, “Nothing. But I’d like to learn.”
Alice might seem like an atypical Scorsese picture, but its opening moments illustrate a fundamental conflict that would come to define his career. We begin on a gorgeously artificial soundstage farm, complete with a painted sunset and pillowy, Valentine red credits introducing our protagonist at the age of eight. She’s shot like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, singing an old standard when Alice’s mother calls her in for dinner and threatens to “beat the daylights out of her” if she doesn’t hurry up. The kid complies, muttering obscenities under her breath as the soundtrack is jarringly overwhelmed by a rockin’ Mott The Hoople song. Here’s the 32-year-old filmmaker helming his first studio picture with all the tools and traditions of a Golden Age system he reveres, yet he cannot help being Martin Scorsese.
That kind of tension animates the entire movie, which follows Burstyn’s 35-year-old Alice from New Mexico to Phoenix to Tucson with her 12-year-old son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) in tow. It’s an episodic story about muddling through and making the same mistakes more than once, the kind of real-life behavior patterns that don’t always lend themselves to cinema. Alice’s husband was an abusive trucker who was horrible to their son. (He’s so hateful to the kid that I always find myself mis-remembering Tommy as her son from a previous marriage. It’s odd that the movie never allows the boy to register any feelings about losing his father, even if the guy was an unbelievable asshole.)
With the help of Mean Streets cinematographer Kent L. Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas (who would go on to cut Taxi Driver and New York, New York for Scorsese before his history-making collaboration with Thelma Schoonmaker began in earnest), Alice has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera and abrupt cuts evoking the characters’ transience and uncertain living situations. It’s more volatile than you’d expect from a story like this, scenes suddenly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom’s mood swings. The thing about Tommy is he isn’t a cute, precocious movie kid. He’s annoying in the way children that age are experts at needling you when you’ve had a long day at work and just need a goddamn minute to yourself, for Chrissakes.
Burstyn’s interactions with child actor Lutter are expert improvisations. The two seem to share a secret language the way mothers and little boys often do when they’ve been on their own together. Driven out of Phoenix after a dalliance with a psycho redneck boyfriend — played by Harvey Keitel with a Stetson, a switchblade and a scorpion necklace — Alice and Tommy find themselves stranded in Tucson, where she temporarily puts her dreams of a music career on hold and winds up working at a diner that may look familiar to fans of sitcom reruns. Alice immediately butts heads with Flo, a potty-mouthed waitress with a beehive hairdo played by Diane Ladd, who very nearly steals the entire movie. (You can see a lot of Ladd’s daughter Laura Dern’s Emmy-winning Big Little Lies performance in Flo’s profane eruptions. You can also see a 7-year-old Laura Dern herself eating an ice cream cone in the background of a scene.)
It is not commented upon enough that a sitcom spinoff of a film by Martin Scorsese ran for nine seasons on CBS. (Only two years fewer than the same network’s sitcom based on a Robert Altman movie.) Vic Tayback’s Mel was the only actor from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore who reprised his role on Alice – young Lutter was replaced after the pilot – though curiously enough, Ladd did wind up joining the cast as an old flame of Mel’s in a later season. (Flo was played by Polly Holliday in the show, memorably turning Ladd’s exhortation to “kiss me where the sun don’t shine” to the more TV-friendly catch-phrase “kiss my grits.” She got a short-lived spinoff of her own, creatively titled Flo.) Even more curiously, a character on the program played by Celia Weston was revealed to be a relative of The Dukes of Hazzard villain Boss Hogg, who dropped by the diner one episode for a guest shot, accompanied by his sidekick, Enos. Does this mean them Duke boys are part of the Extended Scorsese Universe?
Alice and Flo’s slow-building camaraderie is the film’s most satisfying subplot, a good deal livelier than Burstyn’s hesitant romance with a rancher played by Kris Kristofferson. As always, enviably at ease in his own skin and constitutionally incapable of buttoning his shirt, Kristofferson’s character is the perfect man for Alice until he isn’t. Then he is again. The movie feels like it’s missing a few scenes in the final stretches, and Scorsese has admitted he’s only partially happy with the final edit. (“We shot a three-and-a-half hour picture and had to cut it down to two hours,” the director said in 1989’s Scorsese on Scorsese, back in the days before he was allowed to release three-and-a-half hour movies.) Burstyn won the Oscar for Best Actress, but didn’t attend the ceremony because she was performing on Broadway, leaving her director to accept the award on her behalf. He wouldn’t take home one of his own for another 32 years.
Some feminist critics found fault with the film’s Hollywood ending, which is a little more ambiguous than I think it gets credit for. Anyway, by that point we’ve seen Alice suffer enough. Who’s gonna begrudge the lady a few more rolls in the hay with Kris Kristofferson?
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” is streaming on Netflix.
