Alice (Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Productions, Orion Pictures, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 22) my husband Charles and I watched a truly charming film on Turner Classic Movies: Alice, a 1990 release written and directed by Woody Allen and the 10th of his 11 films with his then-partner, actress Mia Farrow. They’d make one more film, Shadows and Fog, before the spectacular implosion of both their personal and professional relationships when Allen started dating Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and Farrow responded by accusing him of molesting their daughter Dylan. Allen became one of the principal victims of the #MeToo movement, along with Harvey Weinstein – whose antics were exposed by Allen’s and Farrow’s son Ronan Farrow, who not only renounced Allen’s name for him (Satchel, after the great African-American baseball pitcher Satchel Paige) but claimed that Allen wasn’t really his father. His dad, he claimed, was Frank Sinatra, who’d supposedly fathered him in a for-old-time’s-sake tryst years after Sinatra and Farrow had broken up. By the time this scandal broke Allen’s career was already on its way down, but this hastened the descent. Sadly, Allen had done for Farrow what Alfred Hitchcock had done for Grace Kelly in the 1950’s: he’d brought out her true acting talent and got far more out of her than any of her previous directors.

Alice is a remarkable, if rather strange, movie that might be described as a magical-realist version of the joint Allen-Farrow masterpiece, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Alice Tate (Mia Farrow) is a bored upper-middle-class wife – you can’t even call her a housewife since she leaves the housework and taking care of her two children, one of whom is played by the real Dylan Farrow, to professional servants. She’s suffering from what the late Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique called “the problem that has no name” big-time; though she’d had career ambitions to be a writer, she gave them up when she married husband Doug Tate (William Hurt) 16 years before. Doug is a well-to-do stockbroker and demanded that she not work because he had more than enough money to support them both. She’s also not considered any extra-relational activity until one afternoon when, on one of her rare days picking the kids up from school herself instead of letting her nanny do it, she runs into Joe Ruffalo (Joe Mantegna), another parent with kids in the same school. Joe is a musician who supports himself on studio work but also is in a jazz band that’s currently working on a tribute album to Duke Ellington. Alice is attracted to Joe and can’t get the look of him out of her mind, though she’s also way too hamstrung by Catholic guilt – she came from a hard-core Catholic family and has an older sister, Dorothy (Blythe Danner), who’s a successful attorney.

Alice is suffering from oddball pains, which lead her to the home-office of Dr. Yang (Keye Luke, in his final film – he died at age 86 three weeks after its release, and it’s nice to see he got to make his exit in a film of quality rather than a piece of shit like Joan Crawford’s last film, Trog). Dr. Yang said her problems are mental, not physical, and he prescribes her a series of herbal remedies which introduce the “magic” element in Allen’s magical realism. One of Dr. Yang’s potions literally makes Alice invisible, and she takes it and uses her invisibility to follow Joe around to his ex-wife Vicki (Judy Davis)’s office, where she watches as they have a for-old-times’-sake sexual encounter on her office couch. This discourages her from pursuing her affair with Joe, but ultimately they make it to bed together. Later on they both take the invisibility drug and Joe dares Alice to make love with him against an outdoor mailbox. Alice ultimately uses her invisibility to crash her husband Doug’s office Christmas party, where she discovers that Doug is having an extra-relational experience of his own with a woman who just won a prestige promotion to a job as a script buyer for a TV network. Alice had hoped to use her friendship with this woman to sell her an idea for a TV show, but she realizes that isn’t going to happen when the woman turns out to be her husband’s lover. Instead Alice returns to visibility in her husband’s office while he’s there with his mistress, and the three have a confrontation.

Dr. Yang’s herbs cause Alice all sorts of colorful effects besides invisibility, including one in which she meets the ghost of her first lover, Ed (Alec Baldwin), and the two go for a fly-over through Manhattan that reminded me of the great scene between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the first Reeve Superman. She also crashes Yang’s office one day and finds his living room has become an opium den. She gets offered a pipe and takes it, ultimately ending up sleeping on the floor along with the other opium users on an evening when she’s sneaked out of her apartment to be with Joe (though the rendezvous fell through) on the pretext of needing to meet her sister Dorothy. There’s also a scene in which Alice is trying to write – she’s using a pre-computer state-of-the-art electric typewriter but the paper she’s put into it remains resolutely blank. Alice suddenly finds herself visited by her Muse (Bernadette Peters), who speaks in gravelly New York tones and is naturally cynical about Alice’s ability to write. Ultimately Alice decides to leave her husband and go with Joe, but Joe isn’t interested because he and his ex-wife Vicki have decided to reconcile, so Alice boldly announces to her husband that she’s going to leave him anyway and travel to Calcutta, India to volunteer with Mother Teresa. Doug naturally thinks this is preposterous, saying that the moment Alice is confronted with life without big expense accounts and high-limit credit cards she’ll abandon the altruism schtick and come back to him and his bankroll. Instead Alice actually flies to India and does a volunteer stint, and when she returns home she moves out to a modest apartment with her kids and does whatever public-service work she can.

According to Wikipedia, Alice was a financial flop on its initial release – it cost an estimated $12 million and grossed $7,331,647 – but seen today it’s a quite charming film, not at the level of Hannah and Her Sisters or Allen’s pre-Farrow masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan, but quite estimable, charming and funny in a low-keyed way. One of Allen’s nicer touches was successfully using the Catholic-guilt schtick as a substitute for the Jewish-guilt schtick he’d used in previous films, including virtually all the ones in which he both directed and starred. Another is the dazzling array of music he uses: Alice contains many great songs of the past (mostly the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s) used as underscoring, sometimes in modern recordings and sometimes in the original versions, or close thereto. I’m glad that Allen used an instrumental version of the British song “Limehouse Blues” to indicate the “Chineseicity” of Dr. Yang and his neighborhood (Limehouse was London’s Chinatown) and spared us the song’s racist lyrics (particularly the “little Chinkies” reference). He gave us this and three other songs – “I Remember You,” “Moonlight Becomes You” and “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” – in big-orchestra recordings made in the late 1950’s and credited to TV comedian Jackie Gleason, but they actually featured jazz cornetist Bobby Hackett. There’s also a howlingly funny mistake in the credits: “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” was actually published in 1926 by songwriters James “Haven” Gillespie, Seymour Simons and Richard Whiting, but Allen listed jazz great John “Dizzy” Gillespie instead – and Dizzy was just eight or nine years old when the song was written.

Alice is a quite charming film, supposedly inspired by a Chinese doctor Allen himself went to for a cyst in his eye as well as Federico Fellini’s film Juliet of the Spirits (1965), another movie about a bored well-to-do married woman (played by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina) who’s tempted to have affairs. It’s an appealing blend of magical realism and Allen’s beloved New York atmosphere (it was shot at Kaufman Astoria Studios, the New York facility built by Paramount in the early days of sound so they could have New York actors make films by day while they were acting on stage at night), and an indication of how much we’ve lost by Woody Allen’s fall from grace even though he’s continued to make films to this day for whatever producers will still have him.