Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore at 50: Scorsese’s low-key, high-impact 70s drama

“I’m as good as I am.”

That’s how Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn), an aspiring singer waylaid at a greasy-spoon diner in Phoenix, Arizona, assesses her talent toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but it could be the thesis statement for the entire movie. Alice has dreamed about being a star since was a little girl in Monterey, California, which Scorsese cheekily depicts as a rural idyll like The Wizard of Oz, only here her Over the Rainbow moment is a largely tuneless Alice Faye cover that leaves her fuming in frustration. Now in her mid-30s, recently widowed and penniless, with a pesky 12-year-old boy to manage, Alice has had to revise her expectations considerably. And they’re still a bit too high.

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So many films from Hollywood in the 1970s would be unthinkable to imagine risk-averse studios making today, but everything about Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore feels almost heroically grounded and minor-key, despite Scorsese’s radiant energy behind the camera. Getting Alice to a place where she can say: “I’m as good as I am” means rejecting the expected feel-good payoff of a woman doggedly pursuing her dream and bringing her to a more nuanced place, where the limitations of her voice and the modesty of her life are no longer a bitter disappointment. She’s an exceptionally salty and memorable character, who Burstyn fully deserved an Oscar for playing, but she’s also refreshingly ordinary, just another American reconciling her pie-in-the-sky ambition with the hand she’s been dealt.

Though he was running hot off the reception to Mean Streets the year before, Scorsese didn’t seem like the obvious choice to make Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, given his attraction, then and later, to stories of masculine guilt and self-destruction. But Burstyn, who’d been looking for a director to add a grittier texture to Robert Getchell’s original script, had the right instinct to champion Scorsese for his first true studio production, which channels the combustible energy of his previous film into what might otherwise have been a down-the-middle melodrama. The hallmarks of a Scorsese production – the active camera, the scintillating music cues, the sharp bursts of humor – are all in evidence here.

Of a piece with a film like Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated The Rain People, another movie about a housewife who wanders audaciously off the map, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore acts as a barometer of modern womanhood without being too tidy about it. The irony is that Alice would never have left the go-nowhere town of Socorro, New Mexico, if her husband, a surly and mirthless truck driver, hadn’t died in a highway accident early in the film. After spending most of their savings on the funeral, Alice sells most of their possessions, piles the rest of them into a station wagon and hits the road with her son, Tommy, (Alfred Lutter), who’s a bit of a pill just like his mom. She intends to make it back to Monterey to revive her singing career, but the two only get as far as Phoenix, where she manages to score a humble bar gig while falling into another in a long series of bad relationships, this time with Ben, a patron (Harvey Keitel) who happens to be married.

A terrifying confrontation with Ben drives Alice and Tommy to Tucson, where she reluctantly takes a job at Mel and Ruby’s Diner, a greasy spoon conveniently located across the parking lot of their latest hovel. But that last scene in Phoenix, where Ben’s wife comes to see Alice before he comes barreling in, sets up a quiet sorority of women in the film who support each other against the volatility and violence of men. Alice is embarrassed and apologetic about her inadvertent affair, but Ben’s wife doesn’t care about the betrayal. She wants the affair to stop because he’s been missing too much work and they can’t afford a light paycheck. Love isn’t even a concern anymore.

It takes time for Alice to find her footing at the diner, but she develops an esprit de corps with Flo (Diane Ladd), a brassy waitress who works an unbuttoned uniform for tips, and Vera (Valerie Curtin), who breaks down in tears whenever she feels overwhelmed on the job (which is often). The diner scenes are the funniest in the movie and the basis for the TV spinoff Alice, but they have both a tougher and more emotional edge here, as the restaurant itself becomes a microcosm of the hassles women like them are up against every day. They’re not the family Alice had in mind any more than waitressing in Tucson was a career goal, but it starts to feel a little more like home.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is an uncompromising film about compromise, refusing to fake a happy ending when a truer, happy-ish ending will do. Alice eventually does find a pretty good man in David (Kris Kristofferson), a diner regular with an easy smile and a nice ranch who nonetheless flashes an uglier side on occasion. He could be a fantasy guy – he’s Kris Kristofferson, after all – but he loses his patience with Tommy in one startling scene and while he redeems himself, it’s easy enough to imagine some future bumps along the way. Alice will have to accept the trade-off, which is a damn sight better than life with her late husband, however flawed it may be.

“You always said you can fight with somebody and still like ‘em,” Tommy says to his mother. The two of them are combative types, given to filthy language and wild fits of exasperation. The film loves them for it and finally gets them to a place worth arguing about.