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 farmyard against a painted sky drenched in sunset red, fog, a wooden house. A caption places us in Monterey, California. Young Alice — gingham, ringlets, a Dorothy silhouette — walks the lane while Alice Faye's "You'll Never Know" plays, and announces she can sing better. Smash cut: Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later, a crane shot of a shabby house, and Mott the Hoople's "All the Way from Memphis" at full volume. The dream is over before the film begins.

The visual references are specific and identified. The farmyard recalls The Wizard of Oz; the wooden house recalls East of Eden; and the sky is a deliberate homage to a named cinematographer's work:

[Scorsese] pays homage to the lighting style created by veteran cameraman William Cameron Menzies for the spectacular skies in Duel in the Sun and Gone with the Wind.

Kelly, Martin Scorsese: A Journey (smj), also quoted in the Companion at smc 122.

What Scorsese says he was doing

Not inference — his own account, twice over. His interest in the film was partly to "comment on old movies", and of this scene specifically:

Trying to make Alice look like a women's movie and yet turn it upside down.

Scorsese, quoted in the Companion, smc 122. The scene is also the one the literature keeps returning to:

The sequence most commented on and most admired is the opening, with its deliberately artificial Classical Hollywood studio look.

A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 26.

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. What that cost is its own datum: The $85,000 backdrop.
• Colour and Lighting. The red sky is not generic nostalgia but a quotation of Menzies, and therefore of a specific studio-era technology for painting emotion onto weather. Technicolor as the colour of promised futures.
• Audio. Alice Faye is the sound of the promise; the glam stomp that obliterates it is the sound of 1974 actually arriving: You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople.
• Spoken language. The profanity inside period diction is the pastiche's built-in bomb. The Companion gives the line as "I can sing better… You wait and see, and if anyone doesn't like it they can blow it out their ass" (smc 122); the Criterion essay gives a different fragment, "I swear to Christ I can". Check the exact wording against the film before quoting it — the sources disagree, which usually means the speech is longer than either quotes.
• Editing / Chronology. The largest ellipsis on this wiki: 27 years in one splice.

Audience

The prologue rigs the whole film, and its first readers said so. Ebert called the reversal between the first two scenes:

A parody of the Hollywood dream world that little girls were expected to carry around in their intellectual baggage a generation ago.

Ebert, quoted in the Companion at smc 122; see also Ebert — Alice review (1974).

Not everyone read the homage as critique. Kay and Peary's 1975 feminist assessment granted the craft of the opening while arguing the film repeats Hollywood's stereotypes elsewhere, and turned the Oz reference against it — Alice, they wrote, is "trapped as surely as Dorothy was caught in Oz" (smc 121). That argument, and the striking reason they distrusted the film's warm reception, is set out in The women's picture, 1974.

Production context

Warner Bros wanted the sequence cut; Scorsese fought and kept it (Criterion — At Home in the World). He had the job at all because of how the studio read Mean Streets — see Martin Scorsese for his own sour joke about it. Defending an expensive, plotless homage on a first studio picture was 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, and the argument about which wins is already in the literature: Kay and Peary say the film's problem "is not its Hollywood conventions" but "the lack of deliberate artifice" elsewhere (smc 26) — which is a way of saying the prologue is the most honest thing in the picture. Christine Geraghty, writing in Movie, reads the style as expressing social tension in the manner of classical melodrama (smc 26). Both are worth arguing with.

Still to check against the film: the exact caption text, the title typography, and the line above.