Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce, directed by Michael Curtiz, released in 1945, and based on a book by James M. Cain, was the film that won Joan Crawford an Oscar. It is sometimes called a film noir, but it is really a melodrama, with a murder tacked on (a murder that was not in the book).

Told in flashback, the film begins with the shooting of a cash-poor playboy, Zachary Scott. We don't know who shot him, but Citizen Kane style, he mutters a word before he dies--Mildred. She is his wife, and is brought in for questioning by police. They tell her her first husband committed the crime, and relaxed, she tells her story.

The spine of the story is that Crawford has done everything for her daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), ruining her own life, and others, in the process. One thinks of the line from King Lear, "How sharper it is than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child," as Blyth is completely oblivious to her mother's love and is an ungrateful social climber, who thinks nothing of faking a pregnancy to get her rich husband's family to give her money..

The story progresses that Crawford divorces her first husband, who has taken up with another woman, and gets a job as a waitress. She and her friend (Eve Arden, playing the classic Eve Arden character--the sarcastic unmarried woman) open a restaurant, and become successful. The investor in the restaurant, Scott, becomes smitten with Crawford, and they date, but when he starts leeching off of her she calls it off. Later, to keep Blyth in her life, she agrees to marry hi, so she can have a socialite's life.

Mildred Pierce is interesting without being great, though Crawford, while overacting at times, does put on quite a show. Crawford was for a long time the biggest female star in Hollywood, the highest paid woman in the U.S., but who can name any of her films today? She is most remembered for the evil mother portrayed by her adopted daughter, Christina, in her book Mommie Dearest. She ended her career in B films, the last being a stinker called Trog.

I watched the film on The Criterion Channel, which opened up shop this week. As part of the program, a documentary on Crawford was included. She desperately wanted to win the Best Actress award for Mildred Pierce, but fearing she'd lose, she stayed home and claimed she had pneumonia. When she found out she'd won, she put on her makeup, got in bed, and the Oscar was brought to her, flashbulbs popping, and she was all smiles.

While Mildred Pierce is not really noir, Curtiz directs it as one, with a lot of shadows and dark undertones. Crawford tries to frame an old friend, Jack Carson, and lures him to the beach house where Scott lays dead. As Carson realizes he's been abandoned in the house with a corpse, he moves frantically around the house, the shadows in sharp resolution.

Mildred Pierce was remade a few years ago as a mini-series starring Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood as the worst mother-daughter combo in movie history. I'm interested to see how that was handled. The central conceit--that a mother can do too much for her spoiled child--is fairly timeless and universal, and could be remade every generation.