Alice (Television Favorites Compilation)
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DVD details
Actor: Beth Howland, Linda Lavin, Philip McKeon, Polly Holliday, Vic TaybackProducer: Thomas Kuhn
Writer: Robert Getchell
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 151 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-27
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Alice (Television Favorites Compilation)
DVD Review: The McCarthy Blacklist Gets the Last Laugh
Summary: 5 Stars
The HUAC hearings of the late 1940s and early 50s ruined the careers of many of Hollywood's best writers and directors. The ones hardest hit by this witch hunt were Jules Dassin, John Penn, Waldo Salt, Dalton Trumbo, and Martin Ritt.
In 1975, Salt, Dassin, Trumbo and Ritt viewed a screener beta tape copy of Martin Scorsese's movie "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," and, with no blacklisting and Hollywood production code to trip them up, set about turning Scorsese's little bittersweet film into a TV sitcom. Starring Linda Lavin in Ellen Burstyn's original role and returning Vic Tayback as Mel Sharples, the diner owner/cook with the salty vocabulary, the quartet of unfriendly Hollywood Ten witnesses set about creating a situation comedy that was so subtle in imparting its socialist messages of racial/class/gender equality that it did so with an all-white cast, which included Nancy McKeon's (The Facts of Life) brother Phillip as the boy with the single mother, predating the Murphy Brown controversy by at least 15 years.
Getting "Alice" past the TV censors--a.k.a., the Sponsors--was no problem at all, because the crypto-communist messages of class division were cast as mere household and workplace spats within the well-worn paradigm of the comedy of manners.
The chief instigator for the socialistic message of racial equality, surprisingly, was Polly Holliday, co-starring as the sassy, backtalking, Southern gal (read: black) waitress Flo. When she told oppressive male diner owner (read: capitalist honky) Mel to "Kiss My Grits," Holliday's retort represented a very thinly-veiled comeback that downtrodden black Americans secretly wanted to unleash against their white racist overlords. Beth Howland as Vera was a stand in for lesbians, though her lesbianism was only implied in the faintest manner possible (her plain looks and lack of makeup), though she did foreshadow "Ellen" by more than two decades.
While its producers meant "Alice" to be a modern version of a strike play (e.g., "Waiting for Lefty"). it totally went over audiences' heads. Although the class divisions (working poor versus oppressive boss poor) were sharply delineated, viewers could access *actual* racial tensions in the Norman Lear shows "All In the Family" and its spinoff, "The Jeffersons." In those programs, viewers could watch actual racial confrontations between white bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) and "uppity" black George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley).
Unfortunately, Marxist critics were quick to point out, even those shows got the class disparity angle wrong by portraying Archie Bunker as a member of a favored social class (blue collar everyman) and Jefferson as a member of the oppressor class (black entrepreneur owner of a chain of drycleaners).
In his groundbreaking monograph on the inherent class and racial divisions in both "Alice" and "The Jeffersons," leading postmodernist critic Jean-Francois Lyotard opined that these ostensible socialists had lived too many decades under the oppressive capitalist American system, which had engrained a counter-productive bourgeoise prejudice in their latent assumptions of racial, class and gender biases.
For a more extensive critique on the latent racism, sexism and homophobia in American sitcoms, read Lyotard's monograph, "Engrained Counter-countercultural Bourgeoise Latencies of White American Socialist Television Creative Male Writers and Producers in the Late Twentieth Century," Harvard U Press, 1998.
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