Available on Blue-Ray
Mildred Pierce is one of those perfect classic movies of the 1940’s that easily ranks with others like Casablanca and The Third Man. It’s a mix of ‘women’s picture’ and film noir based (loosely) on James M Cain’s novella. It helped reinvent its star’s, Joan Crawford, career.
The story starts gritty with a silky smoky finish. Mrs Pierce leaves her faithless husband (Bruce Bennett) for a better life for her and her tantrum-prone teenage daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth). Like all parents Mildred wants to give her child everything that she never had. Show-off Vida, spoiled to the core, is never grateful for mom’s self-sacrifice. After a particularly spiteful act that borders on the criminal, Veda is told to get out of the family home. ‘Get your things and get out. Get out before I kill you!’
Mildred, the single mother, has been working as a waitress before becoming a cake maker (Mary Berry would be proud) supplying local eateries. Then she opens her own restaurant with the help of leering money-man Wally (Jack Carson). As he makes a predatory lunge for her Mildred retorts ‘Wally! You should be kept on a leash!’ Her catering business is a huge success and she looks to a franchise operation. But poor Mildred – once so used to the smell of pies and kitchen grease – may appear to have turned her fortunes around and have it all, but life (and true love) rarely run smooth. She transitions from grubby apron to mink but Mildred ain’t happy. Money and a mansion attract a new boyfriend – the playboy Monty Berrigan (a slithering, slimy performance from Zachary Scott) – whom she hopes to reform, are not enough to save Mildred. She is horribly traduced.
Crawford gives a career-defining performance (film writer Damien Love called her role in the movie ‘the biggest comeback since Easter’) and although the star had a relatively limited range she eats up this script – and won the Oscar – never allowing it to slip entirely into weepy or sugary melodrama. The supporting roles are good too. Eve Arden is wonderfully laconic as Mildred’s ever-so-cynical BFF telling Mildred: ‘Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea: they eat their young’. Although Blyth’s is a tad drippy/pretty for the role of Little Miss Evil, she captures the nastiness and sweetness well. Max Steiner ’s orchestral score is sumptuous. The storyline is tight (William Faulkner had a hand in it), the direction can’t be faulted and the cinematography (Ernest Haller, who did Gone With the Wind a few years before) is something to wallow in.
The true irony of Mildred Pierce is that while Crawford played the loving, self-sacrificing mother in the film in real life she was, according to her estranged daughter’s memoir, vindictively abusive to her adopted children. Despite it all, Crawford has been described the ultimate movie star. And for many fans her star still shines as bright as ever. FX’s forthcoming anthology Feud will see Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon play Joan Crawford and her nemesis Bette Davis.