Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: At Home in the World

Yet even before we can settle into this somewhat unsettling family groove, Donald is gone: a Coca-Cola delivery guy, he’s killed in a highway accident. (Scorsese shows us only the aftermath, in a tableau that’s both awful and gruesomely funny.) Alice is suitably shocked by her husband’s death—until she realizes that this is her chance to reclaim the dream she gave up when she married the domineering cad. She sells off most of the family’s belongings in a yard sale, bids a teary goodbye to her closest friend (played, beautifully, by Burstyn’s real-life bestie Lelia Goldoni), and, with Tommy in tow, leaves the crap town of Socorro, New Mexico, and heads out on the road, with Monterey, California—their Oz—in her sights. She’d grown up there, and done some singing there too. It was the last time she can remember feeling happy and free.

There are shades of the classic Hollywood woman’s movie to the story, pictures—like Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas—in which mothers want the best for their children, often at the expense of their own happiness. But in those movies, men were mostly impediments to joy—better not to have one around at all. Alice presented a new model, one offering the hope of romantic fulfillment and reassurance that women’s lives can be multidimensional rather than constrictive.

Burstyn at the time was just off the making of The Exorcist, one of the most highly anticipated films of its era, and was already a bankable star. Warner Bros. wanted to do another movie with her, though she disliked most of the scripts she read; they were, she has said, “full of stereotypes—the woman as victim, the woman as helper.” Her agent started rooting around for something more suitable, and he came across Getchell’s script, which piqued Burstyn’s interest, though she felt it needed some tweaking. As she said in Mary Pat Kelly’s 1991 book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, “Most scripts need to be polished, but this one needed to be ‘roughed up.’ It was good, but it seemed as if it were written for Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

She also needed the right director, and she called Francis Ford Coppola for advice. He told her to take a look at a film called Mean Streets, which hadn’t yet been released. Burstyn responded to the movie’s brash inventiveness, and to the raffish energy of its star Harvey Keitel. But Mean Streets vibrates with testosterone; she needed to know whether Scorsese could direct a film about a woman’s experience. The two met, and she asked, “What do you know about women?” He said, “Nothing. But I’d like to learn.” Burstyn liked that answer. Together, they worked on the script, and eventually they’d incorporate some on-set improvisation as well. Burstyn loved the way Scorsese trusted his actors.

Although Alice would be Scorsese’s first movie for a major studio, it was his fourth overall, and the hardscrabble origins of his earlier films—including his woolly debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), and Boxcar Bertha (1972), produced by Roger Corman—meant that he understood the necessity of preparation. He’d gotten in the habit of working out all his shots and angles in advance. “When I made films at New York University, you had to wait on line for the equipment,” he has said. “You couldn’t have a camera because so-and-so was using it that weekend. When you got the equipment was when you shot—there was no schedule.”

But Scorsese’s efficiency didn’t mean he was predictable. He opened Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with a dream sequence masquerading as a flashback scene, a reverie drawn from the language of classic Hollywood camera work like that of Duel in the Sun, Gone with the Wind, East of Eden—and The Wizard of Oz. We see the young girl who will grow up to be Alice striding across a landscape of Old Hollywood sunset red as Alice Faye’s version of “You’ll Never Know” unfurls like a dandelion wish on the soundtrack. Little Alice clutches a doll in her arms as she outlines, in rather foulmouthed terms, her dreams of becoming a singer: “I can sing better than Alice Faye, I swear to Christ I can!” It’s a disorienting but great opening, a salvo indicating that no matter what we’re expecting, we’re not in Kansas anymore. The set for that opening scene alone cost eighty-five thousand midseventies dollars, and Warner Bros. wanted to cut it, but Scorsese prevailed. Its out-of-left-field weirdness now seems essential to the film. The sense of dislocation it teases out is the pleasing kind; you wonder, Where the heck is this thing going?

Alice and Tommy don’t quite know either. Though they’ve started their road trip with the utmost optimism, Monterey, as both a physical destination and a dream, is elusive. They stop off and settle for a while in Phoenix, where Alice does manage to land a peanuts-paying job as a lounge singer. She also attracts the attention of a local charmer in a scorpion bolo tie, Harvey Keitel’s Ben, who seems sweet until he’s not. When his violent streak emerges, Alice and Tommy pack up and flee to Tucson, where Alice takes a waitressing job. Workaday stuff rankles her—she doesn’t get along with one of her new coworkers, Diane Ladd’s delightfully potty-mouthed Flo, though the two bond once they realize that, as women on their own, they have more in common than they thought. And the café brings Alice a new love interest, an easygoing divorcé named David (played by Kris Kristofferson, whose honeyed drawl is as reassuring as his crinkle-eyed smile). David may be a dream come true—or he may simply be the charming bulldozer that nudges another dream out of the picture.

Though Alice’s world is miles away from the scruffy universe of Mean Streets, Scorsese’s fingerprints are all over the film, in the casually unvarnished texture of its dialogue, in the way he navigates a sudden tone shift by training a handheld camera on Ben as he flies into a potentially murderous rage. Even so, he’s always attuned to Burstyn’s sturdy radiance. Her performance has a complex, gentle authority, keyed to one central truth: you’ve got to have a sense of humor to get through life. Alice’s husband certainly didn’t. Flo definitely does. And for Alice and Tommy, cracking wise is simply a way of being. As new characters flow around them and into their story, the tapestry of their life together gently shifts in tone and color. Jodie Foster shows up as a smart, sassy tomboy who encourages Tommy to shoplift; Vic Tayback is Mel, the café’s owner, who runs a tight ship even as he delights in his employees’ idiosyncrasies, including those of the space-case waitress Vera, played by Valerie Curtin. All of these people represent, for Alice and Tommy, a life that’s nothing like their old one—a better, freer mode of being.

Audiences, and plenty of critics, loved the film. Both Ladd and Getchell were nominated for Academy Awards, and Burstyn won for Best Actress. It seemed viewers didn’t want to leave these characters behind: the movie inspired the long-running CBS sitcom Alice, with Linda Lavin in the starring role (Burstyn at the time wasn’t interested in doing television) and Tayback reprising his role as Mel. All of that sprang from the world Scorsese created for the character of Alice, and from Burstyn’s portrayal of her. It’s easy to claim that male filmmakers can’t really key into women’s experiences. But Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore shows what can happen when a director and a star listen to one another and build upon each other’s ideas. This is one of the unshowiest of Scorsese’s films; it’s also one of his most tender pictures, freewheeling in its easy warmth.

Some viewers and critics, Pauline Kael among the latter, enjoyed the film but were disappointed by what the ending suggests: that finding a man is central to Alice’s happiness. But Alice has never had a good man, which Kristofferson’s David seems to be. Until the seventies, many women had been trained to seek a provider rather than a simpatico life partner. In 1974, David represented something many women didn’t even know they wanted. Shouldn’t Alice be allowed to take a chance on what could be a great relationship?

To look at Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore through a rigid feminist lens also fails to reckon with the scope of Burstyn’s performance. She’s lit from within but also guarded, like cautious sunlight. And the wary hopefulness on Alice’s face, on Burstyn’s face, as she stands in the doorway of that first motel room, wearing that okay-but-not-great dress, tells you everything about what it takes to bounce back from a fall. Women don’t always restart their lives with radical makeovers. Sometimes it all starts with a polka-dot scarf.

The final scene, in which Alice and Tommy walk along a street in Tucson toward a mildly shabby roadside sign that happens to spell out, in big letters, Monterey—a sign that, according to Scorsese, just popped up, unplanned, in the shot—is perfect. Alice puts her arm around Tommy and squeezes a little too hard; he protests—this was an improvisation, too, from Lutter. More important than ideology is to trust what actors, in this case Burstyn and Lutter, are telling you. Alice and Tommy are walking toward a future of their own making, a Monterey by any other name. It’s their path to chart, and their dream to follow.