Mildred Pierce (1945)

Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth

'Mildred Pierce' is an acclaimed classic movie which has been classified variously as a "film noir", a "woman's soap opera", a "weepy" or a "murder-mystery". It is essentially a combination of all these categories. The movie was based on the hard-hitting 1941 novel by James M. Cain. The plot is simplified and the number of characters reduced.

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The movie was made in 1945, directed by Michael Curtiz who already had several top movie successes to his credit including 'Angels With Dirty Faces' in 1938, and 'Casablanca' in 1942. The movie features a compelling comeback performance by Joan Crawford in the starring role, after a slump in her career and a two year absence from movies. As well as Crawford's unforgettable performance, the acting of the supporting cast, particularly Ann Blyth, Jack Carson and Eve Arden, is first class and makes the film completely believable. The black and white cinematography of Ernest Haller is memorably evocative and adds to the film's noirish quality with frequent use of contrasting light and shadow.

The film was a major box-office hit and was critically acclaimed. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Eve Arden and Ann Blyth), Best Screenplay (Ranald MacDougall), and Best B/W Cinematography (Ernest Haller). Joan Crawford won the film's sole Academy Award for Best Actress for her title role. In 1996 the movie was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.

A definitive 1940's women's picture and a seething domestic soap opera, Mildred Pierce is also a superbly nasty noir, one that plays havoc with the era's ideals of maternal devotion and mom's apple pie. Like other good 'who done it' 1940's movies, 'Mildred Pierce' starts with a murder and then works back.

Joan Crawford plays a housewife saddled with two kids, a mortgage, and a philandering husband (Bruce Mennet). She decides to do something about her drab existence and starts by kicking out and divorcing her husband.

We see her switch roles from middle class homemaker to successful, divorced business woman. She progresses from a waitress picking up tips to a successful restaurateur who could give tips on the money market and CD rates. She endures unfaithful, feckless men, a pretentious, ungrateful bitch daughter from hell (Veda, played wonderfully to the hilt by Ann Blyth) but ultimately financial and personal disaster overwhelm her.

Mildred is admirable for her hard work and self-sacrifice. She is smart, ambitious, and driven, qualities respected and rewarded in the American ethic. But gradually, as she detaches from her husband, and as she favors the unbearable, snobbish Veda over her sweeter younger daughter, putting the child's death behind her with no evident afterthought, we begin to sense an unhealthy, even pathological, aspect to Mildred's compulsion. When she and Veda are both fatefully drawn in by a smooth, duplicitous cad (Zachary Scott), the possessive Mildred's smothering, neurotic indulgence and the ungrateful Veda's precocious appetites inevitably boil over in sexual betrayal and rage. Its a very, very good movie and I'm not going to spoil it for you by divulging the ending.