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

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.

themes
atomic
reception
commerce

Reviewing Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) in 1975, Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary noted that the film's positive reception in Ms. Magazine deserved an asterisk: Warner Brothers, the studio that made the film, held a 25 per cent ownership stake in the magazine (A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 121).

They stop short of alleging anything, and so should we. What the fact does is expose the seam where two context forces meet. A review is a Values document — evidence of what an audience, in this case an explicitly feminist one, made of a film. But the venue carrying that review is a Commerce object, with owners. Reception does not happen in a clean room.

It is the best single teaching example on this wiki for the reception lens, because it needs no theory to land: ask a class whether the review is worth less, and the argument runs itself. The honest answer is that ownership is a reason to check, not a verdict — the same discipline this wiki applies to a release essay or to a gossip-driven history.

Pairs with Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy: there, commerce shaped the conditions of viewing; here, it shadows the conditions of reviewing.

Go on, then

context 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 The Last Temptation collapse, 1983 Paramount cancelled Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ with the sets built and the costumes made. After Hours was the film he made to survive it, and nearly everyone involved reads it as that year turned into a comedy.
idea The Craft got better as it got older Mixed reviews, a surprise hit, then three decades of reappraisal that inverted which half of the film people take seriously.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
idea You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople Two songs across one cut: 1943 crooning smashed into 1974 glam — the whole backstory of a life told in an audio transition.
idea Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending Ritual suicide or tabloid item? The writer and the director give incompatible accounts of the same scene, and the film supports both.