There’s not a wire hanger in sight in Mildred Pierce, but that doesn’t stop Mommie Dearest Joan Crawford from turning in a fierce (though admirably underplayed) performance. This 1945 film earned Crawford a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar and it was an especially sweet victory since Tinseltown had already dismissed the actress as a has-been. With the brave, sacrificial Mildred Pierce, Crawford proved you can’t keep a good actress down for long.
This is a rags-to-riches story of Mildred, a lonely housewife who tries to make something of herself after her husband (played by Bruce Bennett) abandons her. She’d gotten married when she was 17, had two girls and spent most of her time in the kitchen, putting the needs of her family before anything else. Now, suddenly on her own with her girls, she has to summon up her courage and overcome tough breaks. This is years before bra-burning, so Mildred does the next best thing—she opens up a café whose success soon leads to expansion and chains of Mildred’s opening up around California. Along the way, she falls in love with an effete gadabout named Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott) who, when someone asks him what he does for a living, replies, “I loaf, in a very decorative and highly charming manner.” But he offers Mildred love—and plenty of money—and she falls for him. The only thing standing between Mildred and complete and utter happiness is her scheming daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), surely one of the most hissable adolescents ever to hit the screen.
This is one of those strong-independent-woman features that Hollywood turned out for its largely female audiences back in the 1940s (most of the guys were overseas fighting Hitler and Hirohito). In the spirit of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, these movies included A Letter to Three Wives, The Women, Mrs. Miniver and To Each His Own They featured such strong-spined actresses like Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, Greer Garson and Rosalind Russell. Mildred Pierce and company were women’s lib before the term even existed.
Today, however, it’s often regarded as an example of film noir, that gritty crime genre full of dark shadows and dangerous dames. To a certain extent, I’ll go along with the idea that this is film noir. After all, what else are we to make of the opening shot where we hear a gunshot ring out in a beach house, then see a dying man groan, “Mildred.” (How very Rosebud-ish of him!) Is he accusing Mildred or calling for her to help him? Ah, dear viewer, you’ll have to wait for the end of the movie to find out.
Mildred Pierce also looks like film noir, thanks to the cinematography of Ernest Haller. His camera creates a distinctly sharp-edged world that borders on the surreal. This vision of middle-class California is full of hard-boiled light and shadow. For instance, notice how—no matter where she is—Mildred always seems to have a shadow falling across her forehead like a stray wisp of hair. Perhaps Haller is subtly giving her a mark of Cain. [Pun alert: the movie is based on a novel by James M. Cain] Haller’s expert work is so overwhelmingly good that light and shadow eventually become part of the action—as do smoke, fog and Max Steiner’s impressive score.
The film was directed by Michael Curtiz, one of the most prolific and dependable directors of the Golden Age. The Hungarian filmmaker had been around since the silent era and he churned out so many quality films it’s hard to believe he ever slept. The lineup of familiar titles includes: Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Sea Wolf (1941) and more than a hundred others. I’ll stop there; I’m getting dizzy. Mildred Pierce was made three years after Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy (his other 1942 movie, also starring James Cagney, was Captains of the Clouds—can you fathom any director in Hollywood today with such a high-volume output?). Curtiz proves himself to be the master of prolific filmmaking—he keeps everything in Mildred Pierce clipping along at a gallop, even with the constant flashbacks and extraneous exposition in the narration.
Nail-biting performances dominate the movie, cutting through the often sappy dialogue to make us instantly latch on to these characters and care deeply about their rise and fall in life. Even the male characters—limp and useless as they are—have a certain languid charm which make them fascinating to watch. But make no mistake—this is a woman’s picture and Crawford and Blyth pull out all the stops. As Vida, the Daughter From Hell, Blyth is unforgettable. Apart from a few musicals in the early 1940s, this was her first big entrance into Hollywood and for her catty performance, she copped an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, shared with co-star Eve Arden who played Mildred’s down-to-earth friend (and who got in one of the most memorable lines of the movie when she said, “Personally, Vida’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea…they eat their young.”
Crawford is, of course, the pivot point for the whole movie and she simply gives one of her best performances. Personally, I’ve never really cared for her rather garish screen persona, but here she is toned down as a very cautious woman, who seldom gives in to impetuosity but who also finds herself trapped in a web of love and lies. There’s a lot going on behind those tweezed, high-arched eyebrows and Crawford earns every gold-plated inch of her Academy Award.
Crawford had been under contract at MGM for 18 years before Warners wooed her over to their lot. This was the first picture she made for the studio (other than an appearance in 1944’s all-star revue Hollywood Canteen). As with other pictures involving Crawford (as well as the notorious Bette Davis), tensions sometimes ran high on the set. At one point, sparks flew between the star and the director when Curtiz complained that Crawford was trying to make the working middle-class Mildred too glamorous by wearing shoulder pads. Curtiz reportedly tried to fire Crawford and replace her with Barbara Stanwyck and it was only through the diplomatic efforts of producer Jerry Wald that the cameras were able to start rolling again.
Hissy fits weren’t the only problem plaguing Mildred Pierce. Warners had a difficult time bringing the story to the screen. In Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) by Rudy Behlmer, you can read the blizzard of memos that flew back and forth between executives in the studio regarding rewrites and lunches with James M. Cain. A few years after the movie’s release, Tom Chapman, an assistant story editor at Warners, looked back at the whole process. Here’s a snippet of what he wrote (I highly recommend Inside Warner Bros. to film buffs as a first-hand peek behind the Oz-like curtain of Hollywood):
From the first, Mildred Pierce presented a difficult problem in adaptation. As [James M.] Cain originally wrote the novel all the characters in it, including Mildred were unpleasant. It is well know that in a successful motion picture the audience must be able to identify itself with the interests of certain good characters as against certain bad ones….Since it was clear that Mildred must be the heroine of this story it was necessary to clean up her character.
After much scrubbing—and subsequent polishing by Miss Crawford—the result was fantabulous.
Ranald MacDougall gets screen credit for the script, but would it surprise you to learn that there was an army of studio hacks adding bits and pieces here and there? And would you be further surprised to learn that one of those hacks was a writer by the name of William Faulkner? Though he only got official screen credit for six films during his legendary Hollywood years, Faulkner contributed his talents to many others, including Mildred Pierce. You can hear the Faulkner in the script if you strain your ears (and close one eye and balance on one foot and whistle “Dixie”). He’s there in the undercurrent of the story which delves into his favorite area: tortured family relationships (though Mildred Pierce doesn’t have anything quite as odd as Faulkner’s Snopes clan).
Eventually, as described in the book, the script went through more revolutions and gyrations than Elvis’ hips. No one knew quite how to handle Cain’s original story: with kid gloves or with sweaty bare hands?
In another memo, Chapman says Mildred Pierce was designed as “a woman’s picture.” Sure, it gets a little soft around the edges, but thanks to Crawford’s nails-dug-in performance, it has a hard, dark heart.
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