Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Valerie Curtin, Harvey Keitel, Vic Tayback, Billy Green Bush, Jodie Foster, Lelia Goldoni, Murray Moston, Lane Bradbury. [PG]

Newly-widowed thirty-something housewife and mother Burstyn is determined to return to her childhood town of Monterey and become a singer, but dire financial straits sideline her in Arizona, where she winds up a waitress at a small diner and attracts the attention of handsome divorced farmer Kristofferson. Scorsese’s follow-up to his eye-opening Mean Streets often gets lumped into the 1970s women’s lib pack, but it’s more than just a little-person-making-good sort of picture: funny, perceptive, thoughtful, vital, and, yes, messy. That messiness is primarily attached to some overeager camera activity that doesn’t suit the material, and a tendency to drift into the fringes of calculated comic jabs and too-good-to-be-true fantasy, but the film uses the shaky story as a clothesline for meaningful moments and character work, not an ideological harangue, and the balance shifts formidably onto the winning side. Burstyn is very good in her Oscar-winning portrayal, and most of the supporting cast manage to craft authentic individuals to play, even Ladd as a sassy and outspoken co-worker who could’ve easily just been played for scene-stealing comic relief, and Lutter as Burstyn’s chatty, unruly pre-teen son, who’s accurately written to be obnoxiously precocious (and Lutter plays him that way). Screenplay by Robert Getchell. Inspired a long-running sitcom (“Alice”), although Tayback is the only cast member to feature in both projects. Scorsese can be spotted in a brief cameo, and Ladd’s young daughter, Laura Dern, also makes an appearance.

79/100