Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

"Alice" was a long-running sitcom that was immensely popular when I was a kid. It was zany and took place at Mel’s Diner, a greasy spoon in the wilds of Phoenix, Arizona, presided over by the balding, clad-in-white Mel (Vic Tayback in his signature role), an irritable and gravelly-throated menace who was the butt of jokes of his three waitresses: Alice (Linda Lavin), Vera (Beth Howland), and Flo (Polly Holliday), a gum-chewing late Seventies honky-tonk queen who gave birth to the popular catchphrase, “Kiss my grits!” (I’m gonna buy a T-shirt with her face and that phrase underneath it.)

Alice, a singer, broke down with son Tommy (Philip McKeown) en route to New Mexico and ended up, in desperation, getting the job at Mel’s alongside her zany co-workers (Flo, the mouthy, gum-chewing, hillbilly broad with the beehive do; and Vera, the “dingy,” ditzy, none-too-bright but undeniably scatterbrained third). By contrast, Alice is more reserved, seems to speak with a Brooklyn accent, and always tries to do what’s right, what’s best for son Tommy, and just keep her head above water—have some laughs to lighten the load. The four cast members, all of whom are dead now except Polly Holliday, shared a special chemistry that made this show one of the most successful and memorable television sitcoms of all time.

Watching reruns of Alice can be addictive; on YouTube, someone has uploaded them in two- and nearly three-hour blocks. (How they get away with this is anyone’s guess.) The plots aren’t intellectually demanding and often feature Mel and his undoing due to his cheapness or some other factor (as when he tried to fake a Thanksgiving turkey dinner for orphan kids by using a plastic bird. When called on to carve it on live television, he dropped and broke it on the diner floor).

The diner and its patrons bring back a strong sense of nostalgia for a Gen Xer who remembers when people actually dressed like that, and the whole late Seventies, early Eighties era. The female cast members are easy on the eyes, and the diner is a generic, all-American backdrop for mild humor and shifting scenarios that never really get too emotionally heavy. It’s a perfect false, televised, urban “reality,” a place that is as anonymous and somewhat eternal as a FOAF (“Friend of a Friend” story). At least in reruns.

What’s curious is that Alice was actually based on a film that is radically different in tone. Not a zany comedy at all, but a pseudo-tragicomic “slice of life” narrative about Alice Hyatt—here not a Brooklyn émigré to Arizona, but a woman who grew up on a farm with one dream and one dream only: to sing.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a film by Martin Scorsese, who only a year previous had released his Mean Streets, a quintessential American crime drama, a “Great American Movie” starring Robert De Niro as the psychotic Johnny-Boy Civello, and Harvey Keitel as Charlie, a guilt-ridden Catholic childhood friend who is a “made man” in the local mafia. Mean Streets takes place on the mean streets of NYC, Little Italy, and it’s an undeniably male-centered narrative. Only Theresa (Amy Robinson) serves as a counterbalance to all the male swagger and testosterone on display. As the title would suggest, it’s not a “soft” picture. It is, however, almost a perfect film, I would argue.

As if to repent for this, Scorsese released Alice... the following year. It’s undeniably a film centered in the feminine—if not feminist—a drama of a woman, Alice (Ellen Burstyn), who is derailed from her childhood dream (the film begins with a sepia-toned flashback to life on a farm) of becoming a singer by marriage to a somewhat loud, abusive man, Donald (Billy Green Bush), who dies in a trucking accident. Men, in this picture, are all roaring monsters, edgy psychotics, perverts, exploiters—and even Kris Kristofferson, as the romantic lead and love interest David, strikes the viewer uneasily as being a man with buried motivations and an undercurrent of ugly that might—just might—flow beneath the surface.

By contrast, the women—Burstyn as Alice, but also Diane Ladd as the wisecracking Flo—are presented as studies in survival, each dealing with the male-dominated world in their own way (Flo by chiding males in a vulgar, belittling manner; Alice by simply trying to tough her way through raising her son, the precocious and often annoyingly bratty and intelligent Tommy, here portrayed by Alfred Lutter), while attempting to find a stable life amid the economic and social unquiet of a male-dominated world.

After fleeing Keitel’s psychotic, knife-wielding character and settling in Tucson, Alice takes the job at Mel’s, where Tayback takes the verbal belittling of Flo (Diane Ladd) while dishing out grits that Polly Holliday would later encourage him on television—almost every episode—to kiss. Flo is the centerpiece of the second half of this film, Vera having begun fictional life as a mousy, quiet incompetent, but nowhere near as memorable as the character portrayed by Beth Howland. Later, a childhood Jodie Foster is introduced as Audrey (before I realized who it was, I first thought it was a little boy).

Kristofferson emerges later as the handsome, if flawed, leading man, but it is when he tries to discipline Tommy by spanking him that a rift develops between the tired, world-weary Alice and himself. The viewer begins to wonder what the denouement will be—and to say more would give it away. Stuck in Tucson, Alice has a decision to make, one where she must weigh the unfulfilled dream of being a famous singer (she does get a job playing piano in a lounge) against her responsibility to Tommy. How will she decide? That’s the apex of the plot.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is funny in the tragic sense of irony in the lives of its characters—not because of zany plot twists or the hackneyed humor of sitcom scenarios. It is a piece of social realism that is detached, maybe even somewhat stark; the only subtext being the repressed violence bubbling beneath the male psyche in a class- and gender-obsessed society (at least in that era, when bosses could still get away with lewd, suggestive jokes to their employees that, today, would get them sued). Many of the situations, such as Flo’s behavior toward customers as a waitress, seem unrealistic and unlikely. Tayback’s Mel is iconically Mel—a character transferred whole cloth to the small screen from this film. Burstyn is tired, weary, weepy, and resilient. It’s odd, though, that this film inspired a sitcom so very different in tone from the original story.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was, on the whole, a very different entity than the "Alice" TV show, and, like "MASH", was condensed and distilled and translated to the small screen in the language of weekly television viewers—stylizing, enhancing, and boiling down the comic elements for viewers, until they are bright, harsh, overemphasized, and the story loses realistic nuance and subtlety.

It’s a good little picture that inspired a classic television show. And if you don’t agree with me—fine. You can kiss more than my grits, Kemosabe.

Out.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - Original Theatrical Trailer

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