What exactly isMildred Pierce? Is it a drama? A film noir? A proto-feminist declaration? You could argue that the Hollywood watermark is all of the above. Directed by Micaael Curtiz and starring the indomitable Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierceis freshly out on Blu-ray and DVD this week from the Criterion Collection.
The film opens in typical noir style: dramatic lighting and murder. Crawford's Mildred is on the precipice of a dock in California, about to throw herself off when she's interrupted by a strolling police officer. We then go back to the beginning to see how she got there. Mildred's got a cheating, out-of-work husband whom she clearly does not need. Self sufficient, she's already baking and selling pies and cakes out of her kitchen to support her children's piano and ballet lessons.
Tragedy strikes when her youngest daughter, Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe) dies from pneumonia. This event makes Mildred dote on her remaining daughter Veda (the terrific Ann Blyth) far more than she should. Veda's narcissism and extremely rich tastes will eventually cause her own downfall, and asMildred Pierceis Hays Code film, any amoral conduct must be sufficiently punished.
Mommie Dearest And Her Devil Daughter
Mildred graduates from home cooking to opening a restaurant --- and then an entire chain of them --- with the help of her long-time friend Wally Fay (Jack Carson) and at first, the scion of an old money family, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). In order to keep pleasing and placating Veda, Mildred marries Monte, whom Veda worships, because she sees him as blue-blooded and coming from good stock, unlike her mother.
Of course, this odd arrangement cannot last, and it all comes spiraling down around them in grand noir fashion. The downfall of the American Dream reaches the tragic end which we saw at the beginning of the film. Mildred walks off into the dawn with her first husband Bert, pass cleaning women scrubbing floors.
The ending is even more downbeat when you consider the feminist implications ofMildred Pierce--- the protagonist has struggled to raise and provide for her children and escape all the suffocations brought on by her gender roles and the men in her life --- only to walk away with the man who hurt her first, and without her children. Yes, she's self-sufficient and wealthy, butMildred Pierceseems to imply that there's a heavy cost to that independence. When the film was released in 1945 with men returning to the workforce after WWII, this denouement seemed tailor-made to stoke and then quell their fears.
Mildred Pierce (1945) Review
I'm happy to report that the film looks excellent on the Blu-ray, thanks to the new 4K digital restoration. It sounds equally as wonderful, and this edition is a fitting tribute to such an important film. There are a host of extras, including an excellent documentary narrated by Anjelica Huston, which makes this release ofMildred Piercea must-buy.
Do you feel this content is inappropriate or infringes upon your rights? Click here to report it, or see our DMCA policy.Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel is one of the best pieces of TV drama in recent years. (Kate Winslet won a Golden Globe for her performance in the title role.) In the fall 2011 issue of
Is available on DVD and Blu-ray from HBO Home Video: the dual-format Collector’s Edition with director commentaries is list-priced $49.99, 4 discs. (Main photo: Andrew Schwartz. Courtesy of Home Box Office.)
Mildred Pierce (criterion Blu Ray); Michael Curtiz (dir), Joan Crawford
ROB WHITE: The first screen adaptation of Cain’s 1941 novel was Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film starring Joan Crawford as the entrepreneurial title character. The movie quite gratuitously added a noir frame story. Who killed Mildred’s husband? She confesses but the cop realizes that the true culprit is her daughter, Veda, whom Mildred has been loyally trying to protect. Motherhood is therefore presented as wholesome, self-sacrificing, virtuous. Though Curtiz’s film departs from the novel with its crime-thriller spin, in this respect it replicates Cain’s conclusion that: “The one living thing she had loved had turned on her repeatedly, with tooth and fang, and now had left her without so much as a kiss or a pleasant goodbye. Her only crime, if she had committed one, was that she had loved this girl too well.” It’s true that the echo of
(“one that loved not wisely but too well”) points to something darker than selfless devotion—and, earlier on, Cain does at least broach the question of Mildred’s
For Veda: “It didn’t occur to her that she was acting less like a mother than like a lover who has unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness, and avenged it.” But the novel’s verdict, like the 1945 film’s, doesn’t return to this.
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The new adaptation (by Haynes and Jon Raymond) is very faithful to the novel but there are additions. Consider this one, in part 4. After their worst-ever argument, Veda screams words at her parent that aren’t to be found in the source: “You witch! You shrew! You hideous cow!” (This not long after Mildred has demanded, as she does in the book: “Haven’t I given you everything you’ve ever wanted?”) In an interview on HBO’s site for the show Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Veda opposite Kate Winslet as Mildred, explains how she approached the character: “In some ways I looked at Veda as a victim because I felt like she was suffocated and smothered and driven to a point of madness where she would just do anything to get away, to breathe.” Thus the miniseries insists that there’s more to love than selflessness. Which could be called a psychoanalytic perspective. Let me ask you, then, paraphrasing an old and contentious question of Freud’s—what do these two women want?
AMBER JACOBS: Haynes’s (and Winslet’s) representation of Mildred is actually far less pathologizing than Cain’s, which betrays a barely concealed rage and hostility against the mother that cannot be found in Haynes version. The miniseries doesn’t reproduce the classical psychoanalytic construction of the overbearing, suffocating, possessive mother whose deadly desire threatens to swallow up the daughter’s identity, or imprison her in a boundariless
Of psychic merging. Making the best of the more-than-five-hour running time, Haynes gives us a much deeper, many-layered reflection on the vicissitudes of desire. Mildred’s love is rescued from Cain’s spitefulness. Winslet’s extraordinarily empathetic and tender portrayal of Mildred allows for a subtle mediation on the psychic pains and pleasures of maternal subjectivity and love that, in line with Haynes’s other “women’s films” (
In 'mildred Pierce,' Joan Crawford Shone Brightest
) moves beyond typical (and typically psychoanalytic) phobias and blame-the-mother simplifications. Therefore I don’t think that desire is necessarily the best starting point because it risks reproducing structures that Haynes dismantles.
? Mildred’s obsession with Veda is focused on her passionate belief that Veda has something special inside her, a “gift” or “talent” that sets her apart. Curtiz abandoned the subplot of Veda becoming a successful coloratura soprano; Haynes restores it, exploring the ways in which Veda’s music intriguingly mediates between mother and daughter, setting up a dialogue between them (however fraught). What’s put in place is a relation between Mildred’s material, pragmatic, embodied creativity (her cooking and business acumen) and Veda’s abstract, disembodied, ethereal creativity as a performer. There’s scene after admiring, careful scene where we (and often Veda too) watch Mildred baking, waitressing, running her successful restaurant business. These scenes are put into dialogue with ones of Veda playing piano or singing. It’s like a philosophical opposition between different kinds of creativity that’s transferred onto the mother–daughter relation. It’s more than psychology, more than psychopathology. I contend that Haynes forces the question away from a mother-who-loves-too-much construction to the far more interesting question (explored also in the work of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray) of the possibility of representing mother and daughter outside Oedipal psychologizing—instead as a structure that can produce new (and liberating) thoughts. So rather than the question of what these women want, I would prefer to ask:
ROB WHITE: I think that introducing the idea of creativity—or rather a contrast between two kinds of creativity—is fascinating as an alternative to desire. But what’s the further relation between creativity and labor? As you point out, Mildred’s an indefatigable
Edward Copeland's Tangents: Mildred Pierce Parts Four And Five
(and manager, investor, proprietor). At the employment agency in part 1, she says: “I just can’t go home and face my children knowing their mother works all day taking tips and wearing a uniform and mopping up crumbs”—yet when we see her in part 3 in charge of opening night at the first Mildred’s restaurant we can’t be in any doubt that she’s in her element working all day (and night). And for a long time it pays off handsomely. With Veda it’s different: no matter how hard she works at piano-playing, she’s “no damned good” (as she puts it in part 4). She goes further still, calling herself a “goddam punk.” Her transformation shortly afterwards into a fully-fledged concert coloratura is nothing short of magical. No training, no work is needed. She doesn’t even have to audition: her talent is recognized by chance (as she explains at Mildred and Monty’s wedding party in part 5) when Treviso (who had previously scorned her as a pianist) hears her
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