A woman, Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn), is married to a bullying husband who dies and leaves Alice to deal with common independence. So be it. But Alice has a badly behaved 12-year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter), and hopes to be a bar or eatery singer, departing from her dead hubby’s town to try her luck. It isn’t easy. The only permanence is found in a waitress job at a luncheonette, where Alice meets a cordial man, Kris Kristofferson‘s David, with whom she can seemingly begin a serious relationship.

This is a Martin Scorsese film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), which he made rather arty. But the real problem is Robert Getchell’s amateurish writing. The dialogue can be insipid and vulgar (Tommy: “Life is short!” Alice: “So are you!”), and the everyday consorting of mother and son constitutes the angry, nonstop comedy routine of which John Simon correctly complained. Burstyn is first-rate—Lutter is beyond passable—and we do care about Alice. However, I don’t know what to make of the ridiculous Flo and Vera, waitresses at the luncheonette. What I make of the first rush hour scene at the luncheonette is that it’s an overplayed dud. The eatery looks like a hellhole. Alice is the follow-up feature to Scorsese’s Mean Streets, but neither mean streets nor Alice on the road offers me a comfortable cinematic place.

In the thriller The Shadow on the Window (1957), “three young thugs rob a farmhouse, kill the owner and take his stenographer hostage but the woman’s estranged husband, a police detective, starts investigating her disappearance” (imdb.com). Something needs to end the couple’s estrangement. Tony the police detective’s (Philip Carey) investigating does just that. A very young Beaver Cleaver—I mean Jerry Mathers—plays the couple’s small son, shocked into silence after witnessing what the thugs are doing. It is his mother, Linda (Betty Garrett), who is taken hostage.

Directed by movie and TV director William Asher (the movies were often bikinis-at-the-beach items), Shadow largely makes sense and is fun. It competed with TV by being low-budget, but it also means business. It’s dramatically quite fine.

Young Stephen Glass was a “journalist” for the left-leaning The New Republic magazine. Intelligent but unprincipled, he fabricated a lot of his stories—the subject of the Billy Ray film Shattered Glass (2003), starring Hayden Christenson as Stephen.

How the man managed to get away with this for years I don’t know, but it is almost small potatoes since hardly anyone has ever read The New Republic or even most conservative publications. Still, I am curious whether the mag has always been duly concerned about the truth.

Ray’s movie is rather too grave and it does not properly track Glass’s complexity. Too, I think the critic Anthony Quinn is correct in asking, “what is the point of this movie?”

I wish I could see a stage production of Shelagh Delaney‘s play, A Taste of Honey, since it makes for a very small if successful motion picture. Yet the use of a great actor—young Rita Tushingham—helps to turn this 1961 British product to curious gold. Tushingham plays Jo, who feels little loved by her mother (flawless Dora Bryan) and is impudent. Making what is perhaps the worst mistake of her life, she gets sufficiently intimate with a young black sailor to become pregnant with his child. Departing, he doesn’t know about it. Jo gains a friend in a competent homosexual boy, Geoffrey, but he too feels he must leave her.

The film deals with abandonment, even by and of the disrespected of society. Tony Richardson‘s directing is graceful and felt, the extreme closeups well-chosen. The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Delaney, works. He got winning performances from Paul Danquah as the sailor and Robert Stephens (Peter Smith) as well.