I had never seen Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, but I had seen the Alice TV series which was taken from this film. If you think you're going to see a lot of situation comedy here, disabuse yourself of that notion. This original film is as serious as a crutch about a recently widowed woman Ellen Burstyn trying to both raise her adolescent son and find her own fulfillment. Part of Burstyn's identification is that she was named after her mother's favorite film star Alice Faye and has aspirations as a singer. But when we meet her she's settled down in her marriage to probably not the greatest catch in the world in Billy Green Bush and their son Alfred Lutter,III. They live pretty much paycheck to paycheck.But when Bush is killed in an automobile accident, Burstyn wants to move from Socorro, New Mexico back to Monterey, California where she grew up and where she felt truly happy. So they take to the road and the story really starts from there.Ellen Burstyn got her career role and a Best Actress Oscar for this film. It's one multi-layered performance, especially in her scenes with Lutter whose hormones are starting to kick in and he's a handful. She gets into a bad relationship while lingering in Phoenix with a married man whom she didn't know was married. Her scenes with Lane Bradbury as the wife and the psychotic Harvey Keitel when she learns what a violent psychotic he is are devoid of dialog for the most part on Burstyn's part. But her expressions contain so much meaning. Keitel should be commended for his performance here also.In fact after both Bush and Keitel, Burstyn's understandably gun shy when she meets rancher Kris Kristofferson. Is Kristofferson the real deal or is Burstyn just afraid? And how will young Mr. Lutter factor in? For that you need and should watch Alice Doesn't Live Her Any More.The film also got Oscar nominations for Robert Getchell's original story and screenplay and for Diane Ladd as her fellow server at Mel's Diner in Tucson. Ladd's is not the comic performance from the Alice TV series that Polly Holiday was. But she's been around the block a few times and has some sage advice for all who listen. Vic Tayback is the only member of the film cast to repeat his role in the TV series. His Melvin Sharples is subdued here, he really gets to shine on the small screen.Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More was directed by Martin Scorsese and is a timeless film. Absolutely could be remade today and try to figure out who could play these parts with today's players.

Martin Scorsese's fourth feature, a rare anomaly in his oeuvre where a female protagonist is at the helm of the entire story, since maestro can be addressed as anything but a woman's director, but in fact, it is an Ellen Burstyn's star-vehicle, and Scorsese was the young talent being picked by her personally for the project, it won Burstyn an Oscar, a hard-earned victory over Gena Rowlands in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, in hindsight.Burstyn plays our titular heroine, Alice Hyatt, a housewife in New Mexico, trapped in a fraught marriage with his offish husband Donald (Bush), who will soon bite the dust and once he is out of the picture, the newly-widowed Alice decides to pick up her old passion to be a lounge singer to sustain the family, and brings their 11-year-old son Tommy (Lutter), to her hometown Monterey, California, to restart her long-abandoned career and at the same time, earns some money en route.The first stop is in Phoenix, Arizona, Alice is fortuitous enough to find a job in a local bar in the first day of her arrival, but an ill-fated romance with a testy nut-case Ben (Keitel), which halts suddenly in a violent episode, forces them to flee the town as soon as possible, here, Scorsese's regular Keitel, chews the scenery with another love-it-or-hate-it explosion which can be categorically repulsive to watch.The next stop is Tucson, where Alice accepts the job as a waitress in a local greasy spoon owned by Mel (Tayback), where she befriends a brusque fellow waitress Flo (Ladd, whose accessibly flamboyant turn wins her a first Oscar nomination), and encounters a divorced rancher David (Kristofferson), this time, it seems that she finds the right man (after a rambunctious interlude concerns their difference on her method of raising a child), but what about her original plan in her hometown, should she give it up or stick to her dream?Ellen Burstyn wondrously shows her chameleonic facades to unpick Alice's emotions and reactions in a full gamut, also nails the singing and piano-playing parts, her voice is unadorned, far from impressive, but pulses with a feeble quality which very much appropriate for Alice's lot. Alice's relationship with Tommy, is the most contentious takeaway of the film, it seems that their spontaneous dynamism which makes them interact more like friends than a mother and her son, creates many hearty moment with great comic response, but in the third act, when the overstatement of Tommy's spoilt nature is tapped as the ultimate igniter of the fall-out between Alice and David, it is totally at the expense of Tommy's characterisation, although Alfred Lutter III's naturalistic performance is gold, his Tommy turns out to be an utter brat, self-centred, petulant and annoying, so what is the point? One can only blame his upbringing, which must be Alice's fault, she spoils her son, and almost ravages a perfect relationship, but on the other hand, David, under his charming and avuncular miens, he is an abandoner at the first place, that's my major beef about the otherwise pretty scintillating script.The film starts with a sound-stage gambit, a homage to the old-time big studio production in its heyday, and apart from Scorsese's immaculate taste in music, his consistently fluid camera movement promises that he is more than just a hack-for-hire in the cutting-edge business, he is willing to go out on a limb if he is given the right material, and two years later, he would take audience's breath away with TAXI DRIVER (1976).

The movie's first scene shows Alice as a little girl in a parody scene of a musical, where she sings a song out of tune and yet thinks she can make it as a professional. Years later, she is a married housewife with a scary (if not abusive) husband and a badly-behaving 11-year-old boy, and has had a brief singing career. But Alice is devastated when her husband is killed in a truck accident, and she sells her furniture and home and moves to another city with her son, with plans to live in a motel with her son while working with the idea of saving enough money to eventually move back to Monterrey, California, where she had been happy.But things do not go as intended. She meets a man at the place where she has gotten a job as a singer-only to find him a married man, and a violent thug to boot, so she abruptly flees to another city. She cannot find a singing job, so she has to take a waitress job at a diner, which she hates. She is also constantly fighting with her son, who is flippant and disrespectful. She meets another man who definitely has no other wife-but is he a prize? And has Alice been fair to the people around her, who have problems of their own, or has she been too self-centered all along? As the movie reaches the end, she finds herself questioning everything. The man has hit her son, but was that brutality-or did the son, with all his rudeness, genuinely deserve it? Could this man really be a match for her after all? With a child to take care of, is her dream of being a professional singer really important? Then why did she have a husband and son to begin with? These and other questions are asked by the movie's conclusion.

Finally, I get to see a movie that not only won a best actress award for Ellen Burstyn, but one that drew much critical praise and that people still talk about today.It's a simple story: a wannabe singer loses her husband in a road accident and uproots herself and young son to return to Monterey, California, in order to recapture her dreams of singing again. But it has little in common with films such as A Star is Born (1937, 1954 etc), The Jazz Singer (1927, 1950 etc) and others.That's not much of a come-on for this story, but it's a success because of Burstyn's acting (and Alfred Lutter's, as her son), a believable script with great one-liners and the fine directorial touch from Martin Scorsese. The supporting cast, that includes Dianne Ladd, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel, a very young Jodie Foster and others, is also quite in tune – no pun intended – with the episodic and even lyrical nature of Alice's journey to self-fulfillment. Seeing as how most have a sense of wanting to achieve one's dreams – no matter how offbeat or off-the-wall – it should appeal to most viewers.I reckon close to a third of the actual film concerns the mother/son relationship: she trying to please and appease, he trying not to sneer and sneeze at her attempts to get a job – any job – and get back to singing; and providing much of the story's comedy in the process. The rest of the movie takes us along the freeways to her personal triumph, where, in Phoenix, she encounters and escapes from the low-life sleaze of Harvey Keitel; breezes into Tucson and the brashly outspoken Dianne Ladd in the next job as a waitress; and finally meets and competes with Kris Kristofferson's local rancher and his need for another wife.So: no, it's not the usual type of Scorsese production: there are no guns, no drugs, no gangsters, no shoot-ups, and very little violence. Just a well-told and well-filmed story that lightens the heart and makes you laugh – and along the way, reinforces where home really is.Recommended for all, except toddlers.May 21, 2012.