context ·Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

The women's picture, 1974

Values context, both lenses: Alice made inside the women's movement, marketed by a studio, and argued over by everyone.

formula
themes
context-values
reception-lens
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1970s
feminism

Lens: production and reception. Force: values

By 1974 the women's movement had reached the mainstream, and Hollywood was conspicuously short of films about women's lives — the classic studio "women's picture" had died with the studio system. A cycle of feminist-inflected mainstream films (Klute, Diary of a Mad Housewife) was forming; Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) entered it from an unusual angle — a bankable star, Ellen Burstyn, using post-Exorcist leverage to commission the film she couldn't find, rejecting scripts "full of stereotypes — the woman as victim, the woman as helper" (Criterion — At Home in the World; Commerce).

Reception ran hot on exactly the terms the values context predicts: praised as a mainstream film that took a woman's economic and emotional life seriously; criticised — including from feminist positions — for resolving toward a man. The sharpest published version of that attack came from Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, who dismissed it as the work of a "self-admitted macho director" on a feminist trip and pointedly noted that Warner Bros owned a quarter of Ms. Magazine, which had praised it (the Companion, smc 121). That detail belongs to Commerce as much as to values: it asks who owned the platform the acclaim arrived on. The ending was argued about as an ending for 1974, not just for Alice; see Themes on why melodrama's questions and the era's questions were the same questions. The prologue's exhumed women's-picture styling (Alice — the prologue) is the film's own comment on the inheritance it was renegotiating.

Sources

Criterion — At Home in the World; Burstyn — Lessons in Becoming Myself (2006); Ebert — Alice review (1974) as a first-audience document.

The critique, and the suspicion

The film's feminist reception was not warm across the board. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary's 1975 assessment called it "self-admitted macho director Martin Scorsese on his feminist trip", and preferred Douglas Sirk as "a truly worthy women's director". They granted the craft of Alice — the prologue — its use of mise-en-scène, cinematography and music to show both Alice's determination and her adult entrapment — while arguing that Scorsese fell back on Hollywood stereotypes everywhere else, and turning the film's own Oz reference against it:

Our Alice is grown now, with singing career abandoned for man, marriage and child. It's the old story. She is trapped as surely as Dorothy was caught in Oz.

Kay and Peary (1975), quoted in the Companion at smc 121.

The sharpest move in their piece is not the critique but the follow-the-money question behind it: see Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent.

Go on, then

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idea Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent Alice's warmest feminist review ran in a magazine part-owned by the studio that made it — reception and commerce in one fact.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
context The Craft turns on its own coven The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.
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film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.