A post-Exorcist vehicle for star Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) was the first Hollywood studio production Martin Scorsese directed who was hand-picked by Burstyn after seeing Mean Streets (on Francis Ford Coppola’s suggestion). Burstyn plays Alice, a housewife with dreams of becoming a singer who hits the road with her young son, the precocious Tommy (Alfred Lutter) after the tragic death of Alice’s husband and Tommy’s father, a truck driver killed in a crash. While aiming for Monterey in California, the duo keep stopping in different states along the way, living in motels as Alice finds short-term jobs to earn money and winds up with promising suitors on the way. While Scorsese riffs on old Hollywood melodramas (particularly the credit sequence design and the prologue of Alice’s childhood memory as a red-lit artificial farm soundstage), he also draws on Cassavetes’ influence with the conversational style which is both charming, conversational and a little bit maddeningly as people yell at each other or make jokey backtalk. An ingratiating comedy-drama buoyed by Burstyn’s winning performance as well as memorable supporting turns from Harvey Kietel as a slick yet threatening paramour, Kris Kristofferson as a dependable and rugged farmer, a young Jodie Foster as a streetwise friend to Alice’s kid and Diane Ladd as the fast-talking and boisterous waitress Flo at the diner Alice ends up working at (the film would spawn a 1970s diner sitcom named Alice). The film was a box office success and Burstyn won an Oscar but it remains overlooked in Scorsese’s filmography. Recommended.
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