And “Mildred Pierce, ” a beautifully made mini-series that begins Sunday on HBO and stars Kate Winslet, proves the point. It’s a five-part drama that is loyally, unwaveringly true to James M. Cain’s 1941 novel and somehow not nearly as satisfying as the 1945 film noir that took shameless liberties with plot, characters and settings.
The Hollywood version compressed the Depression-era drama into a soapy 1940s murder mystery. “Mildred Pierce” wasn’t by any means the best work of the director Michael Curtiz, who had previously made “Casablanca, ” even though William Faulkner was one of the screenwriters, and its star, Joan Crawford, won an Oscar by playing against type as a loving mother. Yet the movie has had lasting cult appeal, and it’s not just because of all those milky close-ups of its star in varying states of maternal distress.
The tale gives fresh expression to an age-old primal fear: a mother’s dread of being supplanted or destroyed by a daughter. Mildred’s tortured relationship with her spoiled daughter, Veda, is an even darker variation on the classic younger woman/older woman rivalries that fueled “All About Eve, ” “Bonjour Tristesse” and even “The Bad Seed.”
Another Old Movie Blog: Mildred Pierce
The filmmaker Todd Haynes, who directed the 2002 movie “Far From Heaven” as a homage to the 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk, here pays opulent tribute to the written word. Yet his painstaking effort to restore every brushstroke of the author’s original story paints over the ambiguities of class and social ambition that play out within the Pierce family dynamic.
Mildred Pierce is a housewife in Glendale, Calif., whose life is turned upside down in the Great Depression. Her husband, a failed real estate developer, walks out, leaving Mildred a grass widow with no income besides the money she makes baking pies for neighbors. Almost every scene and snatch of dialogue is taken from the book, including the deliciously pretentious airs of young Veda, who as a child is played by Morgan Turner and says things like “One might think peasants had taken over the house.”
The music and the rich cinematography also do justice to the era, and exacting attention is paid to the smallest period details, from the thick, mottled window panes in a Spanish-style bungalow to the square stop signs on two-lane roads to the beach.
This Woman's Work
Both Ms. Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Veda as a teenager, have full-frontal nude scenes. They are “tasteful, ” as the saying goes, but seem designed less to advance the story than to prove, once again, the filmmakers’ dedication to historical accuracy — in even the more remote areas of feminine grooming.
Ms. Winslet is an amazing actress who transparently conveys the heroine’s smallest nuance of feeling, be it shame, irritation, motherly love, anger, sorrow and, once she meets her dashing upper-class lover, Monty (Guy Pearce), lust. But the writers buried the character flaws and class limitations that made Mildred Pierce such a distinctive and modern heroine.
Cain created a woman of modest roots who becomes obsessed with giving her beautiful, snobbish daughter a better life and discovers a knack for business: Mildred is not long a victim and she isn’t always sympathetic. As the author put it, “Into her eyes, if she were provoked, or made fun of, or puzzled, there came a squint that was anything but alluring, that betrayed a rather appalling literal-mindedness, or matter-of-factness, or whatever it might be called, but that hinted nevertheless, at something more than complete vacuity inside.”
Veda Pierce Played By Evan Rachel Wood On Mildred Pierce
The costumes are cut to the fashion of the times, and while that authenticity helps evoke the era of breadlines and speakeasies, it doesn’t do Ms. Winslet any favors. The drab brown print dresses and dowdy necklines make her look dumpier than nature or the part demand. In the book Mildred is only commonly pretty but has unstinting sexual allure. This Mildred looks matronly and well bred, and that miscue is compounded by her genteel speaking tone. Ms. Winslet is affecting in the role of a gutsy, long-suffering single mother, but at times she seems more like Mrs. Miniver than Mildred Pierce.
Ms. Wood is quite entertaining and over the top as a narcissist with a somewhat monstrous gift for deception and cruelty, but the mother-daughter competition would be more compelling if the women’s moral failings were just a little more evenly matched.
The pace is luxuriant and sometimes slow, taking a long time to wind up to its gothic, almost campy denouement, but that doesn’t mean that the detours are not enjoyable. Mildred is surrounded by weak men and fiercely supportive women, and Mare Winningham as Ida, a gruff waitress turned business partner, is particularly appealing. Mr. Pearce, who recently played Edward VIII in “The King’s Speech, ” is good in everything and manages to be shiftily appealing as Monty, the polo-playing Pasadena gigolo.
The Times Film Club — Mildred Pierce
HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” works best as a feminist soap opera — the story of an abandoned woman who sacrifices her pride and everything else for her child, and is checkmated by the object of all that love and ambition. But the mini-series doesn’t make the most of the mythic clash of mother, lover and ungrateful child.
Directed and written by Todd Haynes;Jon Raymond, co-writer; Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, John Wells and Mr. Haynes, executive producers; Ilene S. Landress, co-executive producer. Presented by HBO in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Produced by Killer Films/John Wells Productions.
WITH: Kate Winslet (Mildred Pierce), Guy Pearce (Monty Beragon), Evan Rachel Wood (Veda Pierce), Melissa Leo (Lucy Gessler), James LeGros (WallyBurgan), Brian F. O’Byrne (Bert Pierce).
Blu Ray: Mildred Pierce Review
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mother’s Love, Unrequited. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribebegan as a 1941 novel by James M. Cain. However, it's best known as a 1945 Film of the Book from Warner Bros., directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Joan Crawford.
The film opens with a single gunshot. Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott) collapses onto the floor, and chokes out Mildred before dying. Mildred herself is walking out to the docks, looking over the edge as if to jump. The police take her to the station and she relates her story via flashback.
Mildred Pierce (Crawford) is a typical middle-class housewife in suburbia. Bert (Bruce Bennett) is her recently unemployed husband, and they have two spoiled daughters — pre-teen Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe) and teenaged Veda (Ann Blyth). Bert is against Mildred's parenting style, which he calls buying them love, but Mildred sees it as protecting them. After fighting over this and Mildred's claims that he has been cheating on her, Bert decides to leave.
Film Forum · Mildred Pierce & The Letter
Mildred rebuilds her life by becoming a waitress — though Veda sees the work as degrading — and eventually becomes the owner of a successful restaurant chain with help from her friend and former boss Ida Corwin (Eve Arden) and money borrowed from Bert's onetime business partner, callow heel Wally Fay (Jack Carson). Mildred does anything she can to impress Veda, but the snobbish girl insists on regarding her mother as a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. Mildred eventually marries Monte, a rich playboy, to impress Veda. Things go downhill from there, until we find out how Monte was killed.
In 2011, the original novel was adapted into a three-part, five hour mini-series by Todd Haynes for HBO, with Kate Winslet as Mildred, Evan Rachel Wood as Veda and Guy Pearce as Monty. The mini-series followed the novel more closely than the movie, restoring the novel's Downer Ending and plot points such as Veda becoming a successful opera singer.One of Hollywood’s legendary actresses, Joan Crawford campaigned to get the role that would ultimately yield her Best Actress Oscar, for “Mildred Pierce” (1945). She hadn’t worked in two years. Her 18-year career at Metro Goldwin Mayer, which made her one of the highest paid — and most well-known — actors, was in freefall. By the late 1930s, her movies weren’t as successful as they had been. On May 3 1938, the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association of America released a list of star names that were “box office poison” and whose ticket sales did not justify their salaries. It included Crawford’s name (she was in good company for Fred Astaire, Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburm among others were also noted). She took matters into her own hands and signed a three-movie deal contract with Warner Brothers, taking a cut on her fee. She’d heard about the plans to make an adaptation of James M. Cain’s “Mildred Pierce” — and that Bette Davis was the studio’s first choice but eventually turned it down. Director Michael Curtiz did not want Crawford for the part and preferred Barbara Stanwyck. Most leading actresses didn’t want to take the part because it meant playing the mother of a teenager – thus implying they were older. Crawford agreed to doing a screen test to show that she was capable of doing it. Curtiz and she had a tumultuous time shooting. He’s known to
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