Alice — the prologue

Observation

Before the story proper, a title sequence in the satin-and-script styling of a studio-era women's picture, then a soundstage: a small farm against a painted sky drenched in sunset red, wind in the trees, a dirt lane, a fence. A caption places us in Monterey, California. Young Alice — gingham, ringlets, a Dorothy silhouette — walks the lane singing along to "You'll Never Know" in the Alice Faye manner, the camera craning and gliding in immaculate studio classicism. She announces she can sing better than Alice Faye — "I swear to Christ I can" — and exits on a profanity no child in a 1943 frame was ever permitted. Smash cut: Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later, handheld domestic clutter, and Mott the Hoople's "All the Way from Memphis" at full volume. The dream is over before the film begins.

Connotation, code by code

• Setting / Mise en scène. The Monterey of the prologue is not a place but a memory of cinema — a set that declares itself a set. Alice's childhood is furnished by the movies she watched; the film says so by building her past on a soundstage. The construction bill is its own analytical datum: The $85,000 backdrop — roughly five per cent of the entire budget for one day's shooting.
• Colour and Lighting. The saturated reds quote The Wizard of Oz, Duel in the Sun and Gone with the Wind — Technicolor as the colour of promised futures. The light is sourceless, even, artificial: nostalgic light that admits it comes from lamps.
• Audio. Alice Faye's "You'll Never Know" is the sound of the promise; the glam stomp that obliterates it is the sound of 1974 actually arriving. The two songs are the scene's real dialogue: You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople.
• Spoken language. The profanity inside period diction is the pastiche's built-in bomb — proof the memory is being narrated by an adult who knows how it turned out, and a one-line measure of the distance from Code-era speech rules (Control).
• Editing / Chronology. The largest ellipsis on this wiki: 27 years in one splice. Nothing in the omitted years is shown because nothing in them altered the question the prologue poses — what happened to that girl's certainty?

Audience

The prologue rigs the whole film. Every later scene — the singing auditions, the diner, the negotiated ending — is watched against those ninety red seconds; Alice's Conflict between want (the Monterey dream) and need (autonomy now) is legible only because we saw the dream manufactured, gorgeous and fake, up front. First audiences got the joke from inside The women's picture, 1974: this is the genre's own iconography (Iconography) exhumed and interrogated.

Production context

Warner Bros wanted the sequence cut; Scorsese fought and kept it (Criterion — At Home in the World). Built for $85,000 out of a $1.8M budget and shot in a single day, it was the film's most expensive real estate per second — money spent, in Commerce terms, on an argument rather than a plot point. For a first-time studio director hired by his star (Martin Scorsese; Burstyn), defending it was also a declaration of Personal context: the movie-memory is the movie.

Compare

Psycho — the opening — the other prologue on this wiki that compromises its audience before the story starts: Hitchcock does it by making us trespassers, Scorsese by making us nostalgists, and both films then spend their runtime collecting on the debt.

Writing leads

The pastiche is affectionate and prosecutorial at once — worth arguing about which wins. Check the exact caption text and title typography against the film before publishing. The Criterion essay calls its weirdness "essential"; Ebert's first-run review (Ebert — Alice review (1974)) is the control sample for what 1975 made of it.