Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
After her husband dies, Alice and her son, Tommy, leave their small New Mexico town for California, where Alice hopes to make a new life for herself as a singer. Money problems force them to settle in Arizona instead, where Alice takes a job as waitress in a small diner.
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What critics compared Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore to
And something in the beautiful camera work of Ernest Dickerson, Lee's customary cinematographer, may recall the opening of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," or moments from "New York, New York."
And the film's warm palette of colours, which reminded me intensely of Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), highlights further the innocence and naivety of this past era.
So I would be a fool to expect Roberts to walk off on her own like Ellen Burstyn did in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or Jill Clayburgh did in “An Unmarried Woman.”
The new Tim Burton movie, “Alice: Struck Down by Banality,” (sorry) “Alice: What a God Awful Bore Your Movie Is” (sorry, let’s try this again), “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”--(okay, fine)--“Alice in Wonderland,” is presented in 3-D, which is ironic because the movie itself lacks dimension.
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Then I went back and read the interview I did many years ago with Marty in his apartment in Los Angeles at the top of La Cienega Boulevard, after the release of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974).
The two actresses, both terrific in their limited duties, seem to punctuate the point that women have played relatively minor roles in Scorsese movies (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” being one glorious exception).
It’s almost as if she’s being introduced in order to be erased, and we are reminded of the grave lack of women at the heart of Scorsese’s work, and of how rarely—with the blazing exceptions of Ellen Burstyn, in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974), and Sharon Stone, in “Casino”—they are granted the freedom to occupy center stage.
Scorsese hasn’t put a kid at the center of one of his movies since the 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with another 11-year-old (Alfred Lutter’s Tommy).
The last Scorsese film that Silence is comparable to is Kundun, while there are shades of The Age Of Innocence, The Last Temptation Of Christ, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore about how anti-Marty it is.
A short list of such efforts would include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), and his wonderful recent documentary My Voyage to Italy (2001).
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This fails to take into account the many Oscar nominations his actresses have earned: Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Color of Money, Lorraine Bracco in GoodFellas, Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence and Sharon Stone in Casino.
For every Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Boxcar Bertha there are dozens of Johnny Boys and Travis Bickles roaming the Mean Streets, dividing women up into the virtuous and the fallen.
Paradoxically, the violent, amoral world the film depicts may be the darkest Scorsese has ever shown, but the surface mood is lighter than any Scorsese film since Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
This fails to take into account the many Oscar nominations his actresses have earned: Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Color of Money, Lorraine Bracco in GoodFellas, Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence and Sharon Stone in Casino.