A thriller that blends film noir with domestic melodrama, this 1945 movie starring Joan Crawford is a very different beast compared to the more recent HBO TV miniseries, but it’s just as great in its own right.
I absolutely loved the 2011 Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood, so for me it was impossible to watch the older film adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel without comparing the two. But if anything, they prove that it’s possible to have two distinctive takes on the same material that stand completely apart from each other on their own merits.
The biggest difference is the structural change that re-imagines M. Cain’s domestic drama as a moody and stylish noir thriller. The movie begins with dramatic gunshots in a beach house at night, and Mildred’s name on the lips of her second husband Monte as he’s about to die at the hands of an unseen murderer. Later Mildred is questioned at the police station, where she recounts her story in a series of flashbacks, a device that does lend the movie the kind of urgency that Haynes’ more sedate and leisurely adaptation didn’t really have.
Mildred’s narration takes us back to the Southern California suburb of Glendale, where she’s deserted by her first husband for another woman. After a lifetime of domestic labour, Mildred is struggling to support herself and her two daughters. She is forced to take a job waiting tables, a fact she’s desperate to hide from her eldest daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), a haughty, snobbish princess who just can’t handle the social shame of having a waitress for a mother. Determined to give Veda everything Veda feels entitled to, Mildred builds her own restaurant chain and eventually marries into the high society, but for all her hard work she can never have what she truly wants.
Cold, scheming and narcissistic, Veda is surely in the running for the title of Worst Daughter in Fiction, and the fatally toxic relationship at the heart of Mildred Pierce is one of the most complex and intriguing mother-daughter portrayals I can think of. Mildred has a number of men in her life: her ex-husband Bert, affable and cocky Wally who flirts with Mildred on a daily basis and later helps her with her business, and finally Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), the heir to a once-wealthy family and a professional loafer who’s happy to sponge off Mildred. They all pale into insignificance next to Mildred’s desire to win and keep her daughter’s love, but tragically her blind spot and unchecked adoration only succeed in feeding the monster.
Joan Crawford won her only Oscar playing Mildred, and she’s nothing less than fabulous to watch here, in a performance that’s totally diva and yet so tightly controlled. Her Mildred appears more hard-edged and less consumed with class inferiority than Mildred in the miniseries; she’s also perhaps not very convincing as an ordinary downtrodden housewife, but that’s not something I’m going to quibble over in the context of an Old Hollywood melodrama.
Crawford in fact is so compelling and so full of grit, determination and aching need that she overshadows everyone else in the film, though not by any means due to the lack of good acting elsewhere. To be honest, I didn’t think that any male roles were much to write home about, but Eve Arden provides some female solidarity and acerbic humour as Ida, Mildred’s friend and co-worker, and Ann Blyth is fantastic playing a bad rotten seed.
Some differences between the film and the TV series are dictated by the social mores of their respective times: no graphic sex, nudity and wickedness that goes unpunished please, we’re in the 1940s! The least palatable aspect of the movie, Mildred’s stereotypical helium-voiced black maid, also comes as the baggage of the times. Though I liked the realistic, unvarnished style of the miniseries, I also enjoyed the rich noir flourishes of the film, especially the opening sequence that pulls out all the stops with the spiral staircases and looming shadows on the walls. And oh those glorious shoulder pads! I’m not pining for their comeback or anything, but my does Joan Crawford work them.
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