 Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel
Director: Martin Scorsese
Year Of Release: 1974
Plot: Alice is a 35-year-old woman stuck in marriage with an unpleasant man, trying to raise a rather annoying child called Tommy. When her husband is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, she suddenly has to start over and become the breadwinner. She decides to take Tommy back to her hometown of Monterey, stopping off along the way to earn money. She initially tries to get work as a singer, then becomes a waitress, gets involved with some difficult men, but maybe what she really needs to do is work out what would actually make her happy as a person in her own right. |
Most of the time when people talk about the rise of Martin Scorsese, they talk about Mean Streets and then skip right to Taxi Driver. You can see the logic, as both those films show off the gritty urban feel that Scorsese has become a legend for depicting, and therefore chart a nice direct route to Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino. However the director has had a very diverse career, ranging from his Tibetan epic Kundun to musicals such as New York, New York, but those normally get swept under the carpet because people just want to talk about guns, gangster and maybe his recent, more Hollywood efforts.
One movie that pretty much never gets mentioned is Alice Does Live Here Anymore, which is not only a fantastic film, but is Scorsese’s first proper Hollywood movie and may have actually played a more important role in getting his film career started than Mean Streets did. While his earlier film was a cult success, Alice showed he could work within the mainstream system and make critically lauded movies (Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Oscar for the movie) that struck a chord with audiences. With the movie Scorsese went from being an outsider to someone Hollywood felt it was worth taking a shot on, and so two years after Alice came out, we got Taxi Driver, and a screen legend was born.
Just in case you were wondering, it’s Ellen Burstyn who we have to thank for all this, as it was her who got Scorsese the job. She was looking for a director for Alice, phoned up Frances Ford Coppola and he suggested Scorsese. She then phoned the director up and decided he was the man for the job, and so Scorsese got his first Hollywood gig.
It’s a real shame the film tends to get forgotten when people talk about Scorsese’s films, as it’s a truly wonderful film and a great example of New Hollywood filmmaking. It’s from that brief moment in the 70s when Hollywood made films that seemed to be about real, normal people, going through genuine problems and handling them in realistic ways. Both before and afterwards, Hollywood dramas have tended to be rather stylised, with the people, issues and settings taken to the extremes.
Even those films that are supposedly about ‘normal’ people are often about affluent people with big houses, dealing with the sort of things that most people will never have to face in their entire lives. Take something like In The Bedroom from 2001, which scored five Oscar nominations and was praised for its realistic family drama, but it was actually about an upper middle class family (with a token working class person thrown in) dealing with murder and revenge in rather melodramatic ways. However that’s what passes for realism in cinema nowadays. For Hollywood to be interested today you need gay cowboys up a mountain, down on their luck wrestlers, drug addicts or people dealing with mental illness. While those films all have their place, when was the last time you saw a new film from Hollywood that seemed to be about real people dealing with relatively common problems in realistic ways?
Hollywood hardly ever makes films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore or Kramer Vs. Kramer anymore, where the problems and how people handle them touch you because you’ve known people who’ve gone through the exact same thing. In Alice it’s a woman having to learn how to survive on her own with a kid, after being married for a long time. Although in her case it’s because her husband dies, it could just have easily been divorce. What happens to her in the film doesn’t seem at all forced or overly melodramatic, and there’s only one scene featuring Harvey Keitel that seems over the top compared to real life (and even that’s so well acted and fits so well with the film that it doesn’t mar the overall movie). Alice Doesn’t live here anymore is a truly wonderful portrait of reality and the sort of stresses and pains many people go through.
It’s also a great early example of Scorsese learning his craft. While he hadn’t quite yet perfected his love of the constantly moving camera and complex dolly shots, you can see his style emerging as he experiments with what you can do on film. Many of his later non-gangsters/tough guy dramas have been rather flawed, but Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a fantastic blend of a master filmmaker’s craft emerging, great acting, a beautifully written script and fascinating characters. It’s just a shame that considering how good it is and how important it is to Scorsese’s career, that it so often gets ignored simply because it isn’t the sort of film he’s most famous for.
NOTE: Alice Doesn't Live Here anymore is currently ony available in the UK as part of a Scorsese DVD box set alongside Goodfellas, After Hours, and Who's That Knocking At My Door?.
TIM ISAAC
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