Reeling Backward: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar and Martin Scorsese became an established studio director with this hard-edged dramedy that was later turned into a TV show.

I watched “Alice” on TV through a good chunk of my childhood and was well into the movie critic life before I realized it was based on a film by Martin Scorsese. “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was his seventh feature (including a couple of documentaries) but first studio picture with a sizeable budget. Ellen Burstyn picked him after asking Francis Ford Coppola to find someone young and bold, and he’d seen industry previews of “Mean Streets” prior to its theatrical release.

A hard-edged dramedy with elements of melodrama, road picture and even Western, it won Burstyn the Academy Award and established Scorsese as a reliable studio director.

Burstyn was very much a hot commodity in the early 1970s. After a lengthy stint on television, an Oscar nomination for “The Last Picture Show” and the huge financial success of “The Exorcist” — for which she would get another nod — she found herself in the rare terrain of being an actress just breaking into film in her 40s who had her pick of projects. The only other corollary that comes to mind is Kathy Bates after “Misery,” having been known as a stage actress.

Hollywood loves its ingenues… and also has a tendency to spit them out rather abruptly if they fail to transition to more mature roles. When women like Burstyn and Bates get their break later in life, they tend to have staying power. Bates is still quite busy at 74 and Burstyn, now 90, has no less than five forthcoming projects listed on IMDb.

The original screenplay by Robert Getchell had the elements of a good story, though Scorsese and Burstyn strove to make the material grittier and add some tones of second-wave feminism, which was just starting to burble up at the time.

Alice Hyatt, a 35-year-old woman in an unhappy marriage, finds a new lease on life when her emotionally distant husband dies in a truck accident. She sells everything she has and sets out from Socorro, N.M., with her almost-12-year-old son, Tommy, to return to her former home of Monterey, California, and resume her pre-wedding career as a singer.

She has various misadventures along the way, mostly with her interpersonal relationships with men, and finds herself stuck working as a waitress in a greasy spoon diner in Tucson. She falls in with a kindly farmer, David (Kris Kristofferson), and struggles with whether to continue pursuing her dreams or find happiness wherever she can.

The movie raises a lot of big questions in a backhanded sort of way, such as whether a woman needs a man in her life, the challenges of raising a child as a single parent and the age-old conundrum of reconciling the life we wanted with the one we have, aka “settling.”

Alfred Lutter plays Tommy, and it’s a pretty vivid performance for a child actor. Bespectacled and surly, he apes his mother’s proclivity for foul-mouthed tirades, though Alice protests to other adults she has no idea where he picked up the language. Most of the story takes place over the course of one summer, so Tommy has little to do but hang out in motel rooms and wherever his mom’s currently working, and is constantly protesting how bored he is.

Lutter had a short but busy run as a kid actor. He went on to a small role in a Woody Allen film and played the nerdy kid in “The Bad News Bears” and its sequel. He was set to reprise his role in the TV version of “Alice” and played in the pilot, but found himself replaced by Philip McKeon for the series debut in 1976. He landed another television show the next season, but it only lasted six episodes. Lutter gave up the trade and went on to become a successful engineer and entrepreneur.

Harvey Keitel has a brief but memorable turn as Ben Eberhardt, a younger man who woos Alice during a long stopover in Phoenix. Alice earns the sympathy of a local bar owner by crying out all her troubles to him, landing a gig as a lounge singer. She’s happy enough, even if she’s not earning enough dough to get them to Monterey.

It turns out Ben is married and abusive. His meek wife shows up at Alice’s motel room to plead with her to break up with him, but then Ben appears with a knife and threatens to cut both of them. Alice quickly packs up Tommy and their stuff and flees town.

Kristofferson doesn’t show up until nearly the one-hour mark as a regular at Mel’s Diner in Tucson. He has a nice, easygoing presence, though the movie conjures up a conflict between David and Alice in the last act that feels rather forced. He’s a divorced farmer who seems to have a whole lot of spare time for a one-man agricultural operation, taking Tommy out for afternoon horse rides and fishing trips.

Jodie Foster had one of her first notable film roles as Audrey aka Doris, a confident tomboy who befriends Tommy and lures him into some troublemaking scrapes. She memorably describes almost everything and everyone in Tucson as “really weird,” though doesn’t think to include herself.

Vic Tayback plays Mel, the perpetually irate owner and cook at the diner. He was the only actor to hold over from the movie to the TV show, even wearing the same T-shirt and strange rolled-up stocking cap. In the film the diner is actually called Mel and Ruby’s, though Ruby, his wife, died 14 years ago. Alice quips that the place killed her.

The movie finds its real heart once we get to Mel’s, which is seemingly always bustling despite the general incompetence of the staff and the frequent breakdowns and conflicts that occur in full view of the customers, who act as a sort of Greek chorus.

Things liven up with the arrival of Diane Ladd as Flo, the longtime waitress who holds court with her sassy talk, flirtations and domineering personality. On Alice’s first day, Flo warns the truckers, roughnecks and farmers who constitute the regulars not to play grab-ass with her, and instead direct it toward Flo. She later admits she plays up her brassy nature to earn more tips.

At first antagonists, Alice and Flo eventually learn to become friends, or at least realize they both need someone to talk to and there isn’t another suitable candidate around. Vera, the neurotic and shy third waitress played by Valerie Curtin, leaves as soon as her shift is over, picked up by her motorcycle-riding dad, and doesn’t seem present even when she’s around.

Probably my favorite scene of the movie is Flo and Alice, during a rare slow spell at the diner, tanning in the strong Arizona sun and talking about how they’ve arrived at this particular waypoint in their lives. I was struck by how real and authentic Burstyn and Ladd are, with their uneven teeth and proudly un-made-up faces, and how they contrast with today’s always picture-perfect women onscreen.

Ladd opted not to play Flo on the TV show, so the role went to Polly Holliday, who became an icon and eventually got her own spinoff. Ladd later joined the show after Holliday left as a somewhat similar character, though she reportedly clashed with the rest of the cast and soon departed herself.

Burstyn’s performance obviously is what holds the whole movie together, playing a flawed woman who had to become a widow to find out how strong-willed she really is. Burstyn layers in self-confidence, anxiety and delusion into this portrait. She may not always act in the best way — particularly with her parenting of Tommy, which I’d generously describe as laissez-faire — but her Alice is never less than sympathetic and, in many ways, admirable.

Shirley MacLaine had previously turned down the role of Alice, something she said was one of the biggest regrets of her career after she saw what Burstyn did with it.

Before I go, I wanted to touch on a bit of confusion on my part that revealed some interesting connections.

I’d thought that “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was related to the Woody Guthrie song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” which itself was turned into a 1969 movie. Though screenwriter Getchell previously received another Oscar nomination for “Bound for Glory,” a biopic of Woody’s dad, Arlo. Woody’s song is somewhat reminiscent of the first one on the film’s soundtrack, “All the Way from Memphis” by Mott the Hoople, which is about a guitar that gets lost along the way.

Sort of like Alice herself? Sometimes getting mislaid is the best way to find yourself.