In the following excerpt, Pechter lauds Scorsese's manipulation of film genre conventions in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

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...

Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More is a [slick] Hollywood comedy, taken from [an] artificial, highly structured script by Robert Getchell. However, since it was directed by Martin Scorsese, the talented dynamo who made Mean Streets, the film has a raw energy that shatters some of the script's contrivances…. Alice Graham is a survivor, a woman with an enterprising spirit and a resilient sense of humor. (p. 415) [But] Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More cannot be taken very seriously as...

[Calculated] evasion is typical not only of [Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More], but of a disconcerting number of American items in which an alleged social inquest is taking place with sub-social witnesses whom we're supposed to take on trust as reliable emblems of the human lot. Alice is a boring nobody trying to become a boring somebody, with a minimum of qualifications for being anybody, a peculiar addiction to putrid language and, as extra baggage, [a] monstrous little hostage…. What...