Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE       B             

USA  (112 mi)  1974  d:  Martin Scorsese

A change of pace for Scorsese, his first Hollywood studio production while making one of the few women’s pictures in his career, along with Boxcar Bertha (1972), New York, New York (1977), and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993), where Ellen Burstyn won an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role.  Burstyn had creative control of the movie from the start, as Warner Brothers was so impressed with her work in THE EXORCIST (1973) that they kept sending her scripts and gave her complete control over her next film.  According to Burstyn, “It was early in the Woman’s Movement, and we were all just waking up and having a look at the pattern of our lives and wanting it to be different… I wanted to make a different kind of film, a film from a woman’s point of view, but a woman that I recognized, that I knew, and not just myself, but my friends, what we were all going through at the time. So my agent found Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”  The opening sequence is one of the most remarkable in Scorsese’s entire career, spending two and a half times more money just for the opening set ($85,000) than he did for his entire first film, where after spending weeks building it, on the day of the shoot he was told by a child welfare worker that the child actress (Mia Bendixsen) was not allowed to speak any profanity, which is the kicker line in the opening sequence.  Fortunately Scorsese already recorded an earlier screen test shot, which is the one used in the film.  Opening in a WIZARD OF OZ (1939) dream world with a William Cameron Menzies style tinted red sky that accompanies a young girl’s dreams of becoming a star, that quickly cuts from this highly stylized, artificially illuminated fantasy childhood into a spectacular outdoor crane shot that purposefully jolts the audience ahead 27 years, adding some raucous energy from Mott the Hoople that much of the rest of the film lacks, where the would-be star finds herself sitting at a sewing machine, already consumed by the boring reality of day to day existence Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- (Movie Clip ... YouTube (4:00).  What’s immediately apparent is the film is not written by Scorsese, so it lacks much of the personal insight and fresh spontaneity of Mean Streets (1973), feeling like a more generic story that attempts to play upon populist themes.  Being a Scorsese film, however, there are highly inventive musical choices, well developed characters, and some stunning visual composition, again shot by Kent Wakeford in his last film working with the director.   

While some may find this film refreshingly honest, it’s also a film that pushes all the buttons it intended to push, as it feels at times like a movie with a feminist social agenda, much like Jill Clayburgh in Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978), while at other times it’s much more risky in the way it freely allows characters to evolve naturally, where they don’t hide the growing pains of attempting to deal with the chaos in their lives.  At times it feels overwrought, where the weight of the world always falls upon Burstyn’s shoulders, where her performance often feels too showy, which is highly unusual for her, as after a long career in television, she made quite an impact with her brilliantly understated performances in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971) and THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972), where she tends to exhibit wise-beyond-her-years, rock steady characteristics even as her world is falling apart.  Here, there are plenty of scenes where she just lets it go.  Trapped in a dysfunctional marriage with an emotionally stunted husband (Billy Green Bush), the man is just impossible to please, despite Alice’s most determined efforts, where apparently fighting is part of their family life, each with one another.  When her husband dies in a traffic fatality, it’s as if a part of her world had been sucked away, as she was used to relying upon her husband to pay the bills, sacrificing her earlier dreams of being a singer, as her husband didn’t want his wife to work.  One of the more memorable early sequences is seeing Burstyn with Lelia Goldoni as Bea, from Cassavetes’ SHADOWS (1959), onscreen together as neighbors and best friends, as Goldoni happened to be one of Burstyn’s real-life best friends at the time, so their affectionate camaraderie feels authentic.  Nonetheless, Alice and her 11-year old son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) hop in a car and hit the road, with recollections that her happiest times were in her home town of Monterey, California, thinking she could revive her singing career.  But California is quite a distance, and that costs money, where most of the film was actually shot on location in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, so she doesn’t get very far when she has to get up her nerve and look for a job, culminating in this breathy but intoxicatingly feminine audition which lands her a job Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese) Pian  YouTube (3:37).

Fresh from Scorsese’s last few films, Harvey Keitel makes another memorable appearance here as Ben, a regular customer who takes a shine to Alice, devoting plenty of time and attention that she initially deflects, but she eventually warms up to the guy, even as she knows little about him.  No one could possibly anticipate just how far Keitel takes this film over the edge, as it’s a brilliantly explosive scenario that comes to a quick end as they hightail it out of town, landing in Phoenix where Alice reluctantly gets a job as a waitress in Mel & Ruby’s Café, aka: Mel’s Diner (since Ruby’s long gone), a real-life diner located at 1747 NW Grand Avenue that is still in operation in Phoenix, the greasy spoon diner which was the setting for the spin-off TV series called Alice (1976 – 1985), where Vic Tayback plays Mel the cook in both.  Diane Ladd as the foul-mouthed and sexually charged Flo, and Valerie Curtin as the always spaced out Vera, play the other two waitresses, where after a brief battle of wills, Flo and Alice bury the hatchet and become friends, beautifully expressed here in a near surreal visualization Ellen Burstyn and Diane Ladd in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Any YouTube (1:45).  Add to the mix Kris Kristofferson as David, a local rancher who becomes Alice’s regular customer and new love interest, while also bursting onto the scene is a young child actress named Jodie Foster, an iconic figure from Scorsese’s next film TAXI DRIVER (1976), playing young Audrey Jodie Foster in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) YouTube (4:37), a local girl that schools Tommy on how to shoplift and drink cheap Ripple wine, who after an arrest utters the memorable phrase “So long, suckers!” as her mother embarrassingly drags her out of the police station.  One of the more novel dynamics of the picture is the mother and son relationship, where the child must be devastated at being cooped up in a motel room all day during the summer months while his mother goes off to work, which is a nice contrast with the mother’s annoyance at being imprisoned by a small child who relentlessly demands all of her attention over and over again.  Although Burstyn has an achingly real sequence in a disarming moment where she acts out a childhood vaudeville routine, Keitel, Diane Ladd and Jodie Foster add needed spice and personality to this film, where the secondary characters are often more fun than the leads, where their spark and originality make this more than a conscious raising film coming early in the Women’s Movement of the 60’s and 70’s.  This is a film where women as well as men should re-examine their own lives, change or re-evaluate their perspectives, and reflect upon the old values of compliance and obedience in the role of a dutiful wife.  While the film does emphasize women’s issues, shifting to a position of empowerment, it’s certainly not a radical film in any respect, especially with such a conventional (or cop out) ending, much to the disappointment of many, feeling exactly like the end of An Unmarried Woman, where in both, despite being labeled feminist or women’s films, women were not yet ready to completely let go of the idea of needing a man.         

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID              A-                   

USA  (106 mi)  1973  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah              

1988 restored version (122 mi)             2005 DVD Special Edition (115 mi)

There are various cuts of this film, the original at 106 minutes which was drastically cut by the studios, a 1988 restored version which adds 15 minutes, and a 2005 Special Edition DVD that cuts half of the added minutes.  By all accounts, the 1988 restored version is the way to go, but a recent theater screening turned out to be the 115 minute Special Edition version which cuts some actors out of the movie completely, edits out certain lines as well while re-structuring various scenes.  Peckinpah’s last western feels like a somber death march, a mournful, poetic elegy to an end of an era where the values that men stood by were slowly disappearing along with their freedoms, replaced by the will of a few rich and powerful men who ruled the territory, monetarily and politically, putting an entirely new restricted face of commerce on what used to be wide open spaces and the land of the free.  The applicable metaphor, which is mentioned in the film, is their utter disgust at men who would fence in the West, in this case, cattle barons.  Set in New Mexico in 1881, James Coburn, in what is easily the performance of his career, chucks that career-defining hustler’s grin for a solemn frown as Pat Garrett, a world weary former gunslinger turned lawman, a man who rode with Billy the Kid in some capacity in their past, who opens the film riding into town visiting the Kid, a very young and clean shaven Kris Kristofferson, warning him to get out of the territory, as in 5 days he’ll become a lawman sworn to get rid of him, cleaning up the state, making it safer for bankers and cattle owners and prospective business ventures.  Even earlier, before the opening credits, there is a Black and White sequence of Garrett himself getting gunned down, an event that happens some 30 years into the future, certainly a foreshadowing of ominous things to come, and an interesting use of differing time periods where the death of both are mysteriously but inevitably linked together.    

The first 45 minutes of the film are simply extraordinary, featuring the music by Bob Dylan, whose name is credited above the title of the film and who also appears in a small role, where the mixture of sepia and Black and White from the opening set the tone for some astonishing use of ‘Scope by cinematographer John Coquillon, capturing the essential brightness of the empty desert landscape in early morning, but also the extreme light at dusk, where one of the more brilliant shots is seeing a rider on a horse on the far shore of a river get buried in the dark shadows, but a clear and vivid silhouetted reflection can be seen in the water as he rides across the entire length of the screen.  Two of the opening set pieces are riveting, among the best in the film, the taking of Billy alive and his subsequent jailhouse break out, which is unlike anything seen before or since.  After his memorable escape, someone brings him a horse which immediately throws him, an unusual commentary since it happens in front of a gawking crowd on Main Street right in front of the hangman’s execution site they are constructing.  From that point on, Garrett is on a mission to appoint involuntary deputies to help go after him, avoiding until the end the one place he’s most likely to be, instead visiting a litany of ornery characters throughout the vast territory who are never introduced but seem to have a history together, whose faces are synonymous with westerns, who simply appear out of thin air, where virtually every sequence is built around inevitable killings, compiling a high body count by the end, even for Peckinpah.  These secondary characters are essential, however, as they provide the emotional heft of the film, starting out with Slim Pickens and his rifle toting wife Katy Jurado, carrying bullets in her breast, both of whom appeared in Marlon Brando’s ONE-EYED JACKS (1961) a decade earlier, who silently express with their eyes everything we need to know about the murderous and endlessly bleak landscape.  

As Garrett wanders through the vast expanse of the territory, it’s obvious he’s not in any hurry, that he’s simply setting the tone for his mission by announcing his intentions across the state.  The Kid as well shows no sign of panic or alarm, as the film loses much of its initial vigor and sense of expectation and instead seems to meander slowly to its inevitable conclusion.  Unlike Brando’s film, based on the same Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid source material, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, who inverts the story making the Kid the killer, another infurioratingly downbeat western where a maniacal lawman (Karl Malden) seeks public glorification by building a reputation of killing or humiliating a notorious outlaw (Brando), similar to Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” in Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992), sadistic lawmen who will resort to murder as a way of enforcing the law, Garrett seeks no public affirmation and asks for no special compensation, and is instead driven by a complex code of honor that is already outdated, like the end of the samurai era, and he wearily knows it, where the routine of killing has become a rotten job doing the bidding of others who are more ruthless and brutally despicable than the so-called outlaw.  While there may have been a motivation at the outset, as the Kid broke out of his jail and he sought revenge, but by the end, after the passage of time, all that is surprisingly meaningless, as what he’s asked to do is kill a friend, man to man, someone he respects perhaps above all others, especially those who are paying him to do it.  This hint of anguish and regret affects every move he makes as he eventually closes in, actually waiting patiently outside the Kid’s window as Kristofferson is making love to his eventual wife Rita Coolidge, another sign of obvious affection and respect.  But this is a story of a destroyed friendship, one who remains a free spirit until the end and another who is encumbered by age, duty, and responsibilities, who disappointingly accepts compromise and domesticity, all of which adds to an alcoholic portrait of bitterness and scorn, contemptuous of the vile men he works for and the short-sighted interests of lawmen who seek the same aim, thinking a kill may somehow bring them glory.  For Garrett, fulfilling his duty leaves a pathetic emptiness, dulling any hopes that the future offers any glimpse of righteousness or respectability.