Mildred Pierce (1945)
(by Margot Shelby - Down These Mean Streets) another great review!
Ok, guys and dolls, I'm back. Sorry for maintaining radio silence so long, it got busy. With
very belated entry into Joan Crawford: Queen of the Silver Screen Blogathon from
May 10 - 12, 2019.
“It’s a great tragedy that when people hear the name Joan Crawford, first thing they think of is ‘no more wire hangers’. But there is another Joan Crawford people should remember…She really was the ultimate movie star.” Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Movie Star Documentary 2002.
Love her or hate her, there’s no denying that Joan
Crawford was not only the ultimate movie star but
a consummate actress and a genuine artist as well.
The cult of her personality has so often overshadowed
her work and her talent. Somewhere along the line
Crawford ceased to be an actress and not only became
a Star but an Institution. Then in the end - with her
star status faded - a sad caricature.
Crawford playing a self-sacrificing mother in Mildred Pierce is an irony not lost on contemporary
audiences and a big chunk of the blame
for that can be laid at Christina's infamous book and the subsequent film in which Faye
Dunaway played Crawford as camp all down the line, interpreting her as a crazed drag queen
and an undiluted mental case. It was in essence character assassination. Neither book nor film
did anybody any favors. Whatever the truth may be, Mommie Dearest tainted Joan’s legacy
forever and reduced a career that had spanned almost five decades to one dire little
unfortunate line.
Crawford’s larger-than-life persona can cloud our judgment of her films because
The Crawford Factor often had the tendency to eclipse everything else. How do we define
The Crawford Factor? With the elephant test. It’s hard to describe but we know it when we
see it. The FABulousness, the gloss, the glamour, the Joan. She may not have been generous
to her children, but she was to her audience. A Crawford picture was first and foremost aware
of itself as a Crawford picture.
Joan possessed that elusive but essential quality called star power, in spades. Crawford
constantly reinvented herself during her long career. The radiant flapper of the 1920s
gave way to the determined shop girl on the make of the 30s. By the mid-40s the
shop girls were all grow up with children of their own and Crawford morphed into the woman
from the wrong side of the tracks who makes good against all odds. After Mildred Pierce
she continued to play a variation of that character, a self-sufficient and hard-working woman
who neither accepted deprivations nor limitations. Mildred Pierce is the essence of all (later)
Crawford roles. If she’s never quite convincing as a down-trodden ordinary housewife,
a “common frump”, that’s because she was never completely able to shed that veneer of
glamour that she seemed to have been borne with (but wasn’t). But by sheer force of will she
could pull it off.
If this sounds all suspiciously like a plot of one of her movies, that’s because it is. Her films fit her like a glove because they used elements of its star’s life story, blending together her personal and her screen persona. Joan was so good at playing these gritty characters because they came close to who she really was. Crawford took a character and molded it around her own personality.
Apart from success there was one more thing Joan craved. Approval. She wanted not only Hollywood but the public to love her. This overpowering need for validation
we meet again in the movie. Mildred craves nothing more than the love of her daughter,
desperately so.
There’s no denying that late in her career Joan’s movies steadfastly veered into the
campy. By the time Queen Beerolled around, Crawford was less and less able to reign
in her tendency towards ham. She became the Joan so many people now remember
her as, the bad punchline on the edge of hysteria with a face like a grotesque kabuki
mask, an image that has sadly persisted in the cultural memory. By the 60s she was l
ong past her expiry date but still valiantly plugged away. But now there was a touch of
Norma Desmond about her. She couldn’t let go of her glory days. Our girl Joanie put
up a good fight to the end but never realized that there comes a time when you have to
pack it in.
With Mildred Pierce Crawford struck gold. Her career had been in freefall after a
string of flops in the early 40s and many had written her off as a has-been. She asked
MGM to be released from her contract and to her dismay they took her up on the offer
and kicked her to the curb in 1943. But Jack Warner saw that there was still life in the old
girl. Warner Bros. rescued her and Pierce was Crawford’s celebrated comeback role.
It was a resounding box office success and Joan won an Oscar for it. What had promised
to be a low point in her career turned out to be a career highlight and prolonged her shelf
life by another 15-20 years.
From then on she stayed in the shadowy back alleys of (quasi)Noir.
She followed this success up with Humoresque (1946), Possessed (1947),
Flamingo Road (1949), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and Sudden Fear (1952).
Directed by the great and extremely versatile Michael Curtiz for Warner, Mildred Pierce
is based on James M. Cain’s eponymous novel which was deemed unfilmable for a long
time. Cain had that in common with other pulp writers. Cain’s novels were the kind of
stuff that made the PCA and studio executives equally nervous. They were mean and
downright dirty. So Joe Breen and his cronies wouldn’t get a conniption, as a concession
to the Production Code the novel was overhauled, cleaned up and a murder was added.
Though the screenplay took great liberties with the plot, straying from the source material
was actually a smart move. The Code doesn’t really work against the movie, and the
murder trajects the film straight into Noir territory. Cain’s novel is driven by sexual desire,
the film focuses on insatiable ambition due to (non-sexual) obsession.
housewife and restaurant entrepreneur
Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) is questioned
about the shooting of her second
husband Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott).
Several flashbacks tell us Mildred’s life story.
After divorcing her first husband Bert (Bruce
Bennett) Mildred is in money trouble. To
give her snotty daughter Veda (Ann Blyth)
all that her heart desires Mildred finds
work as a waitress and soon becomes
a dizzying business success with the help
of good friend Ida Corwin (Eve Arden) and
business partner Wally Fay (Jack Carson).
To have access to a high society lifestyle
Mildred marries Monte…with tragic
consequences.
Mildred Pierce has so often been slapped with that dreaded woman’s picture label. There’s no
doubt that the movie is occasionally feverish, but then these kind of melodramas always are.
Absurdities must not only be accepted but embraced, especially when we have top-notch actors
who can easily make the story work and smooth over any contrivance on the filmmaker’s part.
Mildred Pierce is simply a great piece of cinema.
Incidentally the most emotionally draining scenes of the movie are not played for loud effect.
Younger daughter Kay dying of pneumonia is a scene beautifully restrained and Crawford
leaves the scenery unscathed. In Mildred’s and Veda’s fights we can see the fur fly but
it’s kept just this side of histrionic.
Clearly Mildred Pierce occupies a cinematic grey space. Noir takes on the woman’s picture, or
vice versa. A flashback structure casts a pallor of doom over the picture. The beach house is a
modernist dream of split levels, spiral stairs and looming shadows on the wall. The opening
sequence is a knockout. The credits - written in the sand - are washed away by the incoming
tide to Max Steiner’s fantastic score. Then we hear shots being fired, a man is pumped full
of lead, keeling over and gasping with his last breath “Mildred”.
The stylistic means of Noir are used to great atmospheric effect here but we have to look into
the soul of the film to see if the psychological underpinnings hold up to genre expectations. And
indeed they do. Not only do we find the Noir themes of ruthlessness, selfishness, moral ambiguity,
greed, lust, jealousy and dissatisfaction. We also have the most obvious, the elephant in the room:
Obsession.
“The trappings of motherhood and pie baking may not seem like the stuff of film noir, but Mildred’s obsession with her older daughter is as perverse and destructive as any man’s enslavement to a femme fatale.” Imogen Sara Smith, Criterion Collection article Mildred Pierce: A Woman’s Work
The driving force of Noir stories is often the urge to escape. From the ordinary, from poverty, from bad relationships, from oneself. In Mildred’s case her aspirations are not for herself but for her daughter. Veda’s greed is Mildred’s motivation and she subordinates all her own wants and needs to Veda’s wishes.
Mildred puts her children above everything, including her marriage. She is one of those women whose nurturing love for her brood drowns out any other feeling. She explains to her husband that the children “come first in this house, before either one of us. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but that’s the way it is.” Bert no doubt is something of a
dud and a defeatist, he’s lacking Mildred’s drive and will to succeed but to me it’s no wonder
he left. He doesn’t seem to exist for Mildred. He's the one though who is clear-sighted
enough to see what Mildred clearly can’t and won’t. That she’s spoiling Veda rotten and thus
\ruining her character.
Mildred is a protagonist straight from a Greek tragedy. She has a tragic flaw, the character
trait that invariably leads to the protagonist’s downfall. Complete blindness to her daughter’s
character.
Mildred is the quintessential 40s working girl. She epitomizes the American Dream. A
self-made woman who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty, she rises above near poverty
to great success by sheer indomitable spirit, hard work and determination without resorting
to unethical business practices or compromising herself. She’s the gritty stuff America was
built on and is rightly proud of. Even when she was married to Bert she was always busy,
selling cakes and pies to her neighbors out of her kitchen to pay for her daughters’ piano and
ballet lessons.
Contrary to popular belief, it must be stressed that Hollywood in general portrayed working
women in quite a positive light. Taking a closer look at many 40s movies it’s time to overhaul
the preconceived notion that working women played havoc with the ideal of American
womanhood.
"It is often said that men’s discomfort with women’s entry into the workforce during World War II conjured the figure of the femme fatale, which demonized strong, ambitious women. This theory makes no sense, since the femme fatale is never a woman who works or is independent; she is always a woman who uses men to get what she wants, relying on the most traditional feminine wiles. Women who do work, like Mildred and Ida (or like the secretaries played by Ella Raines in Phantom Lady and Lucille Ball in The Dark Corner, or the nightclub performers portrayed by Ida Lupino in The Man I Love and Ann Sheridan in Nora Prentiss) are invariably good eggs, while femmes fatales are like Veda, avaricious gals who would rather cheat and exploit their desirability than work for what they want.” (Smith, ibid.)
I can add a few more movies that subvert the accepted wisdom. Joan Leslie in Born to be Bad,
Roz Russel in His Girl Friday, Jane Randolph in Cat People, Ella again in The Web and The
Strange Affair of Uncle Harry and Anne Crawford in Bedelia.
Looking like a luminously beautiful porcelain doll, Veda has the face of an angel and the soul of a cash register. If you look up the word entitlement princess in the dictionary you’ll find a picture of her. Ann Blyth was only 16 verging on 17 when she made the movie and for someone that young she turns in a fantastic and chilling performance. Hell, she turns in a fantastic performance no matter the age.
She must be the youngest femme fatale in film ever, “a femme fatale in bobby socks” (Smith, ibid.). Outwardly so sweet you can literally feel the cavities eating into your teeth, she is really a spider woman whose gossamer light web is woven so delicately that by the time you notice you’re in it it is already too late.
Veda perfectly understands the finer points of psychological warfare. She uses her mother’s love for her against her. Veda’s cruelty is always deliberate, each and every one
of her poisonous darts is designed to cause the most pain. A contemptuous user for whom any
gift is too shabby, Veda is a bottomless pit of greed and is always working one angle or another
because happiness can’t buy her money.
Veda has complete control over her emotions…that’s because she hasn’t any. She can switch
on a particular human emotion at will - or at least a good imitation of it. When she notices that
a tantrum won’t do the trick, she changes her tactics to declarations of love and tears. “I’ll change,
Mother, I promise. I’ll never say mean things to you again.” Would she like a little bit of cheese
with her whine?
Considering the fact she’s still a teenager, that little dame is frighteningly knowledgable, about
everything. Aided and abetted by her mother’s business partner Wally, Veda marries rich kid
Ted Forrester just to take him to the cleaners. Having the marriage annulled shortly after, she
extorts a $10,000 check from his mother claiming a fake pregnancy. This isn't cheating, mind
you, it’s just skewing the results in her favor. Mildred might smell of grease but Veda knows
a thing or two about high-class prostitution. She then proceeds to seduce her mother’s
second husband. “There’s something to be said for alligators eating their young.”
and it is Veda who is obsessed with it. She acts
like a spoiled heiress despite being an heiress
to nothing. Veda is ashamed of her mother’s working
class background, her shabby home and her - gasp!-
work as a waitress. So bourgeois. Mildred and family
may have crossed the railroad tracks, but Veda
can still hear the train roar.
The scene where Veda accuses Mildred of
“degrading” the family by waitressing is painful
to watch for its sheer maliciousness. Veda detests
the “smell of grease” on the money from her mother’s
restaurants though that doesn’t prevent her from
taking the developmental aid anyway while
holding the source in contempt.
“You think just because you made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can’t, because you’ll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. With this money I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you.”
She spits out those lines like they’re poison. If Veda is not the most venomous femme fatale
in Noir history, she’s definitively a contender. Veda openly aspires to an aristocratic life in which
she lives on wealth she never earned and looks down upon those who do as akin to something
the cat dragged in. Oddly enough singing at a grubby waterfront dive for hooting sailors doesn’t
seem to bother her. Full speed ahead, Fleet Week. We always knew those singing lessons
she took were good for something. Unfortunately we never get to know the root of Veda’s
social ambitions. There is nothing in the film to explain the origins of her attitude. Maybe it
was Curtiz’s little stab at California’s post-War burgeoning consumer culture.
In the end Veda blames her mother for all her crimes. “It’s your fault I am the way I am”. In a
way she’s right, there’s no doubt Mildred is enabling a sociopath. After all, Gods and
Goddesses don’t exist until someone builds a temple to them.
If ever a dame was itching for a good walloping it’s Veda but I don’t believe Mildred created
Frankenstein’s monster. It’s another nature vs nurture debate. I don’t think anything that Mildred
could have done would have changed Veda. Neither love, nor understanding, nor setting
boundaries, nor discipline would have made any kind of impact on Veda. To paraphrase
Lady Gaga, Veda was born that way. There’s a bad seed in her, her venality is all her own.
In the book we can assume that Veda may have started out human - maybe - but was warped
by Mildred's adulation and attentions. As incarnated in the movie she was simply born without a
moral compass.
This is one of the few movies where the audience has pity with Crawford, usually not an actress
to evoke this emotion. Both trailer and promotional material are misleading to the highest
degree and expressively designed to make as little sense as possible. The audience is made
to believe Mildred wrecks every life she touches.
“The kind of woman most men want... but shouldn't have!”“Loving her was like shaking hands with the devil.”“She wasn’t too particular how she got what she wanted.”
Zachary Scott was always best when playing slimy heels and human specimens that are practically slithering, and he certainly doesn’t disappoint here. The moment we see him we know he’s Snidely Whiplash. That’s because he has a pencil-thin mustache. The flat broke offshoot of a once-wealthy Pasadena family, Monte Beragon is a leech, a lounge lizard and a self-confessed sponger with a perpetual cash flow problem. What does he actually do for a living? “I loaf, in a decorative and highly charming manner.” Work, the bane of the freeloading class. He sure sounds like a winner.
The family’s fortunes may be gone but he hasn't lost his sense of entitlement and class conceit. He continues to live in that never never land of ritzy manor houses, polo fields and posh country clubs. The only thing he has left is his spurious charm. And precious little of that.
In the beginning Monte lets us think that he may be really in love with Mildred. It’s no wonder
she falls for him, he makes her feel desirable again. Soon however Mildred is bankrolling
Monte’s high-flying life style. Mildred finally catches on to what he is but marries him anyway,
not because she’s still in love with him but because through him she has access to the
aristocratic lifestyle Veda craves.
Scott breathes life into a portrayal that could easily have come off as one-dimensional, because
Monte is a type who embodies a single defining trait: greed. It is to Scott’s credit that he’s
walking the tightrope between that combustible mix of charm and contemptible cad so perfectly.
looks like a well-fed chipper cherub but it would be
unwise to underestimate him. He has a knack for
one thing: making money. He’s always on the lookout
for a quick buck…or a hundred. He’s the one who
cooked up the plan to swindle Ted out of $10,000 because
he gets a cut of the proceeds. It’s not that Wally is a bad
guy, it’s just that he never occupied any moral high ground.
On the credit side, he shows genuine concern for
Mildred’s well-being - he warns her against Monte - but
he’s also a wolf on the prowl and makes at least two
passes a week at Mildred which she easily pitches back.
He’ll just bide his time with another martini.
In fact he’s a guy who’d naturally sniff around any
halfway attractive woman who crosses his path. It’s an
automatic reflex with him. He draws the line at damaged
goods though. He never falls for Veda. Smart man.
He knows a rotten thing when he sees it.
Wally lays on that sleazy charm a bit thick but in a
likable sort of way. He’s never shy of a wisecrack and
never met a bad joke he didn’t like.
After misappropriating funds to support his lifestyle Monte ruins Mildred's business and Wally is
caught with his hand in the cookie jar too, leaving Mildred high and dry. Wally does feel bad about
it though. Really.
“I didn’t mean to cut up your business the way I did. Just got started and couldn’t stop. I see an angle, right away I start cutting myself a piece of throat. It’s an instinct. With me being smart is a disease.”
No hard feelings then.
After Monte’s murder Mildred tries to make Wally the fall guy but somehow I get the feeling he
wouldn't hold it against her, what with not being hampered by an over-abundance of conscience
himself and all. Wally understands why Mildred had to do it.
This must be one of Carson’s best roles and he runs with it. Somehow he makes this guy
absolutely likable. Sure, Wally’s a crook and a louse who’d sell his own granny for a quick
buck but that’s no reason to hate him. I like him against my better judgment. What better
judgement?
But both Mildred and Bert are cleared of the murder. Outside the sun begins to rise, peeking though the clouds and maybe - just maybe - there is a better future ahead.
The reason why Mildred gets sort of a happy ending and does not have to pay for her “sins” as per Joe Breen’s dictates is because her maternal love, though misguided, was untainted by sin. Mildred’s sacrifices are never portrayed as anything but noble and selfless. The worst the movie - rightfully - can accuse her off is blindness, but it is made very clear that there is no evil in Mildred’s ambition to better herself.
So if your mental image of Crawford conjures up visions of a campy old broad with a bias against wire hangers I say get over it. For all her artificiality
Crawford had the capacity to show her audience the damaged soul beneath the
mannered surface. And she could bulldoze over any script absurdity like nobody's business.
Thank you.
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