Alice, Sweet Alice
Alice, Sweet Alice, originally titled Communion, is a 1976 American psychological slasher film directed by Alfred Sole, written by Sole and Rosemary Ritvo, and starring Linda Miller, Paula Sheppard, and Brooke Shields in her film debut. Set in 1961 Paterson, New Jersey, the film focuses on a troubled adolescent girl who becomes a suspect in the brutal murder of her younger sister at the latter's First Communion, as well as in a series of unsolved stabbings that follow. Mildred Clinton, Niles McMaster, and Jane Lowry co-star, with Louisa Horton and Lillian Roth appearing in minor roles.
Sole developed the film's screenplay with Ritvo, an English professor who was his neighbor, drawing influence from Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. He assembled a cast of New York City-based actors to appear in the film, largely from theater backgrounds. Principal photography took place throughout the summer of 1975 on location in Paterson and Newark, New Jersey. Through his architectural career restoring historic buildings in Paterson, Sole was able to secure several properties there as filming locations.
The film premiered at the 12th Chicago International Film Festival in November 1976 under its original title, Communion; it opened in England in September 1977 under this same name. After being acquired by Allied Artists, the film was re-titled Alice, Sweet Alice, and released in the United States on November 18, 1977. It was theatrically reissued again in 1981 by Dynamite Entertainment under the title Holy Terror, with a marketing campaign that exploited Shields's appearance in the film following her rising profile. Because the film was not properly registered for copyright between its reissues, it was widely distributed in the home media market by public domain companies until 1997 when Sole made small editorial changes to the film, allowing him to re-copyright it in a variant version.
Alice, Sweet Alice received mixed reviews from film critics, though it was met with largely favorable reception in England. Sole's direction and Sheppard's performance received praise, though many critics found the film's graphic violence and religious themes obscene and anti-Catholic. It received accolades from several film festivals and critical associations. In the years since its release, it has gained a cult following and is considered a contemporary classic of the slasher subgenre in critical circles, as well as an example of an "American giallo." It has also been the focus of scholarship in the areas of horror film studies, particularly regarding its depictions of Roman Catholicism, child emotional neglect, and the disintegration of the American nuclear family.
Plot
In 1961, in Paterson, New Jersey, divorced mother Catherine Spages visits Father Tom with her two daughters, nine-year-old Karen and twelve-year-old Alice, who both attend St. Michael's Parish Girls' School. Karen is preparing for her First Communion, and Father Tom gives her his mother's crucifix as a gift. A jealous Alice puts on a Halloween mask, frightening Father Tom's housekeeper, Mrs. Tredoni. Alice steals Karen's porcelain doll, scares her, and threatens her if she tells anyone.Moments before her First Communion, Karen is strangled to death in the church transept by a person wearing a Halloween mask and a yellow raincoat; her crucifix is ripped from her neck and her body is set on fire. A nun makes the horrific discovery, disrupting the communion ceremony. After Karen's funeral, Catherine's ex-husband Dominick begins to investigate her murder independently while Detective Spina handles the case formally. Spina suspects Alice may be responsible for her sister's murder based on her documented history of antisocial behavior. Catherine's sister Annie moves in to help her, though Alice and Annie despise each other. Annie also expresses her belief that Alice murdered Karen, much to her husband Jim's dissent.
Catherine sends Alice to deliver a rent check to their landlord, the morbidly obese Mr. Alphonso. When he attempts to molest her, Alice hurts his pet kitten by strangling it and hurling it at the floor. Annie is attacked and stabbed by a masked figure in the apartment stairwell. At the hospital, she claims that Alice tried to kill her. Alice is detained and takes a polygraph examination, and insists Karen is the one that attacked Annie. The results show Alice is telling the truth, but she is still sent to a psychiatric institution for evaluation.
Dominick receives a hysterical phone call from someone claiming to be Annie's daughter Angela, saying that she has Karen's crucifix. Dominick agrees to meet her at an abandoned industrial building. There, the figure stabs him and bludgeons him with a brick before binding him with rope. Dominick sees that the killer is in fact Mrs. Tredoni, who chastises Dominick and Catherine as sinners because of their premarital conception of Alice and subsequent divorce. After Dominick bites Karen's crucifix off Mrs. Tredoni's neck, she pushes him out a window to his death.
Catherine goes to visit Father Tom. He is not home but Mrs. Tredoni invites her in. She explains that when her own daughter died on the day of her First Communion, she realized that children are punished for their parents' sins. In her grief and madness, she devotes herself to the church. Father Tom arrives and tells Catherine that Dominick has died. During Dominick's autopsy, the pathologist finds Karen's crucifix in his mouth, and Alice is eliminated as a suspect. Father Tom and Catherine go get Alice from the institution.
Mrs. Tredoni sneaks into Catherine's apartment building. Mr. Alphonso wakes up screaming, as Alice had mischievously placed a jar of cockroaches on him while he slept. He encounters Mrs. Tredoni in the stairwell and mistakes her for Alice. Mr. Alphonso shoves her against a wall, unmasking her before she stabs him and flees. Detective Spina witnesses Mrs. Tredoni running out maskless through the back door, but is unable to save Mr. Alphonso.
Mrs. Tredoni rushes to the church, unaware the police are stationed there in hopes of apprehending her. During Mass, Father Tom denies Mrs. Tredoni communion and discreetly attempts to escort her to police. She stabs the priest in the throat in front of the congregation as the police rush in. While Father Tom bleeds to death, Alice emerges from the chaotic scene carrying Mrs. Tredoni's shopping bag, and places the bloodstained butcher knife into it.
Cast
Analysis and themes
Catholicism
Numerous film scholars have noted the film's hysterical portrayal of Catholicism and religious institutions to be in direct confluence with the motives of its villain, Mrs. Tredoni, whose ultimate goal is to "punish" the sinning members of her parish; this has resulted in some claiming the film to be overtly "anti-Catholic". Writer-director Sole's own proclaiming of himself as an "ex-Catholic" has also been cited regarding the interpretations of the film's religious themes and undertones. Prior to writing and directing Alice, Sweet Alice, Sole had directed his debut feature, a softcore adult film titled Deep Sleep, in 1972. The release of the film resulted in obscenity charges being brought against him in the state of New Jersey, as well as formal excommunication from the Catholic Church. This event has been credited as influential to the apparent anti-Catholic bent of Alice, Sweet Alice.The murder scenes in the film have been described by genre scholars such as John Kenneth Muir as "stark and shocking," and noted for their use of "powerful imagery" correlating with the film's religious overtones. Muir views the film as a precursor to such films as Seven, which focus on individuals being punished by death for their sins and character flaws. Catholic iconography is featured prominently throughout the film, including votive candles, crucifixes, and rosaries, as well as artistic depictions of the Virgin Mary in sculptures and paintings. In his book Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, writer Tony Williams commented that the "adolescent psychotic fantasies" of Alice are paralleled with the ritual practices of the Catholic Church. Williams concludes that the film "bleakly indicts oppressive forces of family and religion as responsible for producing monsters," and that its ambiguous conclusion suggests that Alice herself has become "polluted by the social system" that drove Mrs. Tredoni to commit the murders in the film.
Sheila O'Malley of Film Comment notes that: "From one scene to the next, religious iconography overwhelms the screen: paintings of Mary and Christ, marble statues, crosses on every wall, religion leering at the characters from behind. Parishioners kneel at the altar, pushing out fat tongues for communion, looking like a parade of aggressive Rolling Stones logos. Religion is not a refuge in Alice, Sweet Alice. It is a rejection of the body itself, but the body—its tongues, its teeth, its menstruation—will not be denied."
Additionally, Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine observes that the presentation of the church sequences signifies a closed-in nature that "favors cramped medium shots and close-ups that induce claustrophobia. The characters always appear to be cramped together in the church, on top of one another, and their homes are composed of similarly small passageways." Despite this, Bowen asserts that the film is not "exactly an indictment of the church," but rather a "febrile portrait... of how society enables dysfunction on multiple fronts, from the domestic to the religious to the psychiatric." Writer Troy Howarth echoes this reading in his book Unholy Communion: Alice, Sweet Alice from Script to Screen, writing that the film "is not strictly anti-religion... Sole stops short of suggesting that everybody in the Church is corrupt." He cites the sympathetic portrayal of Father Tom to support this, suggesting that it is "the dogma itself which is at the heart of Sole's commentary" rather than the church community at large.