Go Ask Alice by Jonah de Forest

A little girl trots along a Technicolor farmscape, singing the wartime standard “You’ll Never Know.” Fanciful cursive text tells us this girl is Alice, and the supposed location is Monterey, California. Baring pigtails and cradling a baby doll, Alice proclaims, “I can sing better than Alice Faye, I swear to Christ I can.” Heeding the call of an aproned mother in the distance, Alice makes her way to the porch, but not before doubling down on her remarks, “You wait and see. And if anybody doesn’t like it, they can blow it out their ass.” The frame recedes into the abyss, and the aspect ratio changes, Mott the Hoople’s propellant rock song “All the Way from Memphis” announcing our arrival in New Mexico, 27 years later.  

This is the vantage point audiences enter Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: somewhere between sentimentality and crassness, pastiche and realism, fantasy and rude awakenings. Released in 1974, Alice marked Scorsese's first studio effort after directing the independently produced crime drama Mean Streets a year earlier. Working from a screenplay by Robert Getchell, Ellen Burstyn won a well-deserved Oscar for her performance as Alice Wyatt, the recently widowed housewife who scrapes for a second chance at life. 

As a child, Alice harbored show business aspirations, but gave up on her dreams at the behest of her brutish husband. She didn’t mind domesticity per se; it was her husband’s hotheaded temperament that put her on edge. A grisly car accident takes his life and propels her into independence, freeing Alice from his volatility but leaving her broke and unmoored. With her preteen son in tow, she leaves New Mexico in hopes of finding work in California as a singer. Falling short of her desired destination, the two of them wind up in Arizona, where Alice begrudgingly takes a job as a waitress in a diner.

The film has something of a screwball rhythm, with Pauline Kael branding Alice, along with the work of filmmaker Paul Mazursky, as “the closest anybody with talent and brains has come lately to the romantic, marital-mixup comedies of the thirties.” Burstyn has an everywoman affability that suits this tone—hard-boiled but warm to the touch, appeasing onlookers with an inviting smile and sharp comic timing.

Fresh off of playing Linda Blair’s mother in The Exorcist, Burstyn hand-selected Scorsese to direct Alice after receiving a three-picture deal from Warner Bros. Scorsese is often associated with a certain brand of filmic machismo by both his fans and his detractors, typified by the likes of Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street. I wager that if one were to find a true throughline in his work, it’s not testosterone but rather a freewheeling approach to genre, from the Liza Minnelli-led big band musical New York, New York to his proto-Lynchian comedy of errors After Hours. 

Alice reads as Scorsese's attempt to update the domestic dramas of the ‘30s and ‘40s with a contemporary pulse; a riff of sorts on what has been deemed the “woman’s film” by film scholars. Targeted at female audiences, the thrust of this genre was matters of the heart: sacrifice, romance, and motherhood. Author Molly Haskell wrote that at their most distinguished, the woman’s film functioned to “Take the woman out of the plural into the singular, out of defeat and passivity and collective identity into the radical adventure of the solitary soul.” This is the sort of psychic journey that Alice embarks on, who is, in essence, the misplaced heroine of a woman’s film dropped into a New Hollywood desert. 

By the early ‘70s, the single mother was an increasingly visible figure, bolstered by no-fault divorce laws and the dawn of second-wave feminism. Jackie Kennedy, arguably the most famous woman in the country at the time, was herself a widow, admired for the grace she brought to solitary parenting. But if Jackie represented an idealized image of single motherhood, her composure almost saintlike in the eyes of the public, then Alice is the lived reality. She’s irritable and often negligent; her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter, giving one of the great kid performances) is a bit of a twerp, but neither of them is ever far from our sympathy. In fact, the scenes with Alice and Tommy are among the funniest and most affecting in the film. They win our affections in their capacity to barrel toward the unknown together, an odd couple configured by grief and circumstance.

Outside of Tommy, most of Alice’s interactions with the opposite sex are colored by the threat of danger, from leering bar owners to her romantic conquests. In Arizona, she takes up with David (Kris Kristopherson), a handsome ranch owner whose tenderness stands in contrast with the gruffness of her late husband. As the film reaches its third act, David has his own frightening outburst, making Alice question if she’s falling into old habits by committing herself to him. If we’re given a chance to start over, are we doomed to make the same mistakes? 

By the end, Alice has not become a completely liberated woman; she still makes a sacrifice in the name of companionship. Even so, she remains firm in her pursuit of becoming a singer—however improbable—if only because her dreams are something that are hers and hers alone. The neatness of this ending makes Alice something of a fairy tale for a decade marked by a “crisis of confidence.” If you can’t have it all, you can at least have some and spiritually evolve in the process. 

Like the passage of time, Alice moves forward because she simply must, forging a path out of the necessity of invention. The title doesn’t denote that Alice has settled somewhere else, only that she’s not where she once was.