Forgotten Favourites: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese’s ferocious early classic

It was a hit in 1974, yet even Martin Scorsese seems underwhelmed by the movie that won Ellen Burstyn a Best Actress Oscar. He calls it nice. He says the money he made from it allowed him to make Taxi Driver. Scorsese is widely held to be one of the greatest directors of all time – and he’s my favourite director in the whole wide world – but the gospel according to St Marty is flawed.

The story of one woman’s hard-scrabble search for happiness is as good as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy. There are no guns. No one’s face gets pulped. But the humour is savage and the threat of violence makes the air snap crackle and pop.

The opening credits are lush (insanely so; we feel like we’re choking on velvet). Next we get shots of our heroine’s childhood on a prairie farm that resembles a grandiose set from Citizen Kane. Clearly, Alice’s interior life is shaped by epic movies and, as it turns out, that’s causing problems for her hemmed-in adult self. Now a 35-year-old housewife and mother in New Mexico, we see her with a best friend, pondering the size of Robert Redford’s penis (Alice and her friend dream big).

Suddenly, Alice learns that her husband has been killed and, partly because she’s broke, she decides to reinvent herself as a singer. She’s aware that her voice is average. Still, she’s convinced she’ll make it in Monterey, so she and her shrimpy, precociously caustic, son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter), hop in the car.

What follows is a down-to-earth version of The Wizard of Oz, a yellow brick road movie in which the songs are sad, we never reach Oz and a doting man (Harvey Keitel) proves scarier than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Burstyn, as you’d expect, is brilliant, her defiantly non-pristine face pumping out mischief and pain. Just as impressive is Diane Ladd as a lewder-than-life waitress in Arizona, while Kris Kristofferson, as the lover Alice longs to trust, is quietly sensual and Jodie Foster, as a jubilantly salty delinquent, kerpows every line of dialogue that comes her way. Lutter, by the way, was a non-professional. Ironically, he has the best comic timing of all.

Robert Getchell’s script is consistently meaty. Alice is haphazardly determined to treat Tommy as her equal (which drives the men in her life crazy). She can also be assertive on her own behalf – before offering her a job, a bar owner asks her to twirl around; “Well, look at my face,” says Alice, “I don’t sing with my ass!”. Just as often, though, her confidence crumbles and she wishes she had a “master”.

Are humans doomed to bully or be bullied? That question haunts Alice, as it does all Scorsese’s protagonists. His films, though, are rarely dominated by women, which is why it’s especially important that people discover the ferocious, frazzled, Alice. Note to Martin: embrace one of your earliest creations – she’s a credit to you and, in the age of hashtagMeToo, seems more relevant than ever.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is available to view on Amazon Prime and BFI Player