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.
- context-values
- reception-lens
- production-lens
- 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 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.