My expectations of [Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More] were based mainly on Scorsese's previous feature, Mean Streets. Though "widely acclaimed," as the ads say, this left me cold. Oh yes, I admired the efficiency of its making. Dark, glinting interiors, edgy dialogue, strategic bursts of action, long takes with the camera immobile or slowly prowling like a hit man waiting to strike—sure, Scorsese knew what he wanted to put on the screen and how to get it there. You can see this ability taking shape in his short student films: the satirical It's Not Just You, Murray skips nimbly through space and time while the simple joke of The Big Shave comes out in a linear crescendo. Scorsese is not only efficient but versatile, matching different means to different ends. But what was the end in Mean Streets?

It seemed to be little more than high-class melodrama—a display of hyped-up situations and attitudes. (pp. 55-6)

Scorsese told interviewers that the film distilled youthful memories of New York City's Little Italy—it really was like that, he said, referring to the general atmosphere of the film rather than to specific events. If so, I could give Mean Streets the benefit of the doubt and assume a cultural gap due to my own English background.

But with Scorsese's short documentary on his parents, Italian-american …, the presumed cultural gap failed to show. The film was accessible and enjoyable. Of course, it gives an objectified view of the New York Italian experience, quite unlike the subjective dramatization of Mean Streets. All the same, the parents' speech and gestures embody the culture that is being discussed and, having a spontaneity that goes beyond any of the improvisation in Mean Streets, plays an important part in shaping the film as a whole. In short, Scorsese's directorial hand rests on this film much more lightly than on Mean Streets. So the cultural gap is probably not at issue, and my case against the melodrama of Mean Streets must remain open….

Now comes Alice, which marks a big break with Scorsese's recent film-making…. With the leap from studio-made thirties to real seventies Scorsese is symbolically detaching himself from his own remembered past. He is turning from New York City to the desert states; from an exclusive and specific Italian milieu to a generalized Anglo-Saxon Protestantism …; and from a predominantly male view of the world to the experience of a woman. (p. 56)

Scorsese spent a long time with Ellen Burstyn and writer Robert Getchell in working out the final details of Alice's character and experiences. In addition to its obvious advantages, this kind of collaboration involves risks—a possible loss of focus, a compromise rather than a reinforcement of creative ideas. Such weaknesses do seem to emerge toward the end of the film. David remains a curiously thin character: the viewer learns very little about his outlook on life, or for that matter his way of life (his ranching appears to be only a hobby). Yet he marks the culmination of Alice's odyssey: when last seen, she has given up another slice of her independence for this indefinite man. This editing looks like a retreat from sharper alternatives.

In other words, after trying to find fault with Alice for being too neat, I'm now suggesting that it isn't quite neat enough. But here, too, a shift of angle is possible. This isn't meant to be a conventional happy ending, with Alice finally in the arms of Mr. Right. It may be just a tentative halt in her odyssey. David remains "thin" because Alice herself doesn't know him yet, though she likes him well enough to find out more….

The last scene of the film includes more than Alice, David, and the Monterey Motel. Taken with a telephoto lens, it also brings a distant mountain looming over the casual activities of the street—a confrontation of the permanent and the transient, of solidity and disorder, of Alice's dream and the reality she is learning to cope with. (p. 58)

Like the opening leap from past to present, this final image can also be applied to the film itself. The vigor of Alice arises in large part from a similar confrontation—between the elements loosely described … as "too neat" and "not neat enough." I am referring here not to the simple oppositions between studio and location, planning and improvisation (since Mean Streets, which incorporated all of these, lacked the particular quality of Alice), but to a flexibility or unexpectedness in the matching of form and content…. It is the continual shifting of modality between the schematic and the diffuse which stimulates the viewer to adjust his/her mental focus, and thus discover fresh implications in Alice's odyssey. (pp. 58-9)