Musicians in Movies: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Dir Martin Scorsese, 1h52m, 1974)

1973. Ellen Burstyn is, off the back of The Exorcist, one of the most powerful actresses in Hollywood-she's already been approached by Warner Bros midway through the horror movie's production to make another film with then. Burstyn has picked Robert Getchell's script for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and is now, via a meeting with Francis Ford Coppola, looking for someone "new and young and exciting" to direct it. She will pick a young Italio-American film-maker, off the back of his third feature, the crime movie Mean Streets. Martin Scorsese has arrived in Hollywood. Yet the film he will make with Burstyn, playing a young widow against her precocious troubled son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter) and a grizzled but ultimately warm ranch owner (Kris Kristofferson) stands alone in Scorsese's filmography as a road not travelled, a studio-driven female-focused romantic comedy.

Burstyn is the centre of Alice Doesn't Live Here, and her performance carries the film; Following a brief dream sequence, an elaborate pastiche of The Wizard of Oz complete with colour tinting and the song “You’ll Never Know”, in which the two elements driving Alice - her attempts to return back to the idyllic Monterey, California of her childhood, and her thwarted attempts to be a singer neatly dovetail - so we are brought into the present, with the blast of Mott the Hoople. The deliberately artificial, deliberately cinematic childhood has been replaced with grounded reality, motherhood, and marriage. 

The piano, her connection to music, sits unplayed as she carries out sewing. In one shot-we won't see the gruff and disciplinarian Donald (Billy "Green" Bush) for several minutes-we have swapped from idyll to reality. It's as much a moment that belongs to Scorsese's meticulous music choices as Martha Lucas's tight editing, bringing the film down from three hours to a brisk two. 

The relationship between father and son is tense, his brief moments in the film either disdain or argument with his son, let alone that between husband and wife-the sole scene of them in bed together has Scorsese and DoP Kent L. Wakeford, returning after working with Scorsese on Mean Streets, holding on Burstyn's face as she silently cries. Yet, his death, barely ten minutes in, is at once a sudden jolt into action and onto the roads of America, and a release from the unhappy marriage. The sequence immediately after his death and funeral is not further grief, but Alice sitting at the piano, playing "Where or When", less fugue, and more the attempt to recapture her own feelings about music and performing. Here, as Alice sells the majority of her possessions and hits the open road with her son, that the film reveals its secret weapon, Lutter.

Even in these driving sequences, before the film gets into its stride, Burstyn and Lutter are a superb dialogue; easy enough to say for Burstyn, already on her second Oscar nomination after The Last Picture Show and The Exorcist, but for much of the film, Lutter (nominated for a BAFTA for the film) holds his own, to make this a superb double-hander. This, after all, is a portrait of a child ultimately searching for a father figure, for stability, as much as it is his mother looking for work and somewhere to live. This alone would make for fine melodrama, but both, especially Lutter, imbue Alice with a wry, and often offbeat sense of humour, including a water-fight between the two in a motel room that senses at a lost sense of innocence that Alice is trying to claw back as much as indulging childish fun

Juxtaposing these are the film's more emotionally charged scenes, where Alice has to face the lack of structure and her son's rebelliousness, much of this coming once the duo arrive in Tucson, and Tommy falls in with troubled teen Audrey (an early role for Jodie Foster). Here, the film's decided lack of sentiment - there are no shortage of truly emotive moments, but these are tempered with a grounded, and unmistakably Scorsese-ian grit - is in full effect, Alice dumping her drunk teen son out of the car to stumble part of the way, before Lucas' editing shows the maternal the morning after, the caring, as she silences the alarm clock and moves the blankets around her son. For every moment of sentiment, Scorsese follows it with reality. 

Nowhere is more evident than the men in Alice's life; Donald is barely in the film long enough to leave an impression other than as a disciplinarian. Yet her, and Tommy's, life with him is idyllic compared to the nightmarish arrival of Harvey Keitel's Ben, who, having struck up a friendship and soon a relationship with Alice, is found to be cheating on his wife; Keitel storms into the motel room and assaults his wife, who has tried to confide in Alice; the mother and child terrified by his destruction of the room. Scorsese's only true burst of the violence typical of his other films is neither the payoff for violent characters nor cinematically "cool". It is what he portrays it as-frightening for a single mother and child to be subjected to. Even when having found a job in Tucson, it is her colleague, the scene-stealing, no-nonsense Flo (the late Diane Ladd), who she warms to first, despite their difference backgrounds and very different views on men and being objectified by men.

Even when Kristofferson's David appears in the film, and soon begins to win over Tommy, Alice is wary of this tough macho rancher; David is warm, certainly - one cannot help but be won over by Kristofferson's performance, even as he is turned down by Alice - but his performance is more nuanced than the rough rancher he appears to be. Scorsese seems to be building to an, even for him, saccharine ending, as the two slowly fall in love, but events take a sudden turn and the seemingly idyllic couple have to face the grit of reality, and David threatens to be simply another violent and impulsive man -yet, again, Scorsese surprises us, portraying the working class people of this area with warmth. Alice may not have intended this ending, but 

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a film about compromise - Alice has to compromise, not just with her relationship with David, but with her dreams - Alice may never become a professional singer, may never get to California, and may have to contend with the ups and downs of family life, but what Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore most reveals is a great "What If", of Martin Scorsese as a director of well-observed urbane dramas rather than the great chronicler of American masculinity. 

Rating: Highly Recommended

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is available via DVD from ‎ Warner Bros. Home Ent and streaming from AppleTV

Next week, David Bowie descends to Earth in a career-best performance in Nicholas Roeg's portrait of an alien visitor in The Man Who Fell to Earth.