Michael Curtiz (1945)
It starts with a bang – several bangs. Gunshots ring out and a man falls to the ground, murmuring ‘Mildred …’ before he dies. This introduction and the shadowy lighting immediately establish Mildred Pierce’s credentials as a film noir – reinforced by the information in the opening credits that the source material is a James M Cain novel. The cinematographer Ernest Haller sustains the edgy chiaroscuro throughout; the investigation of the first-scene murder supplies the movie’s basic narrative structure. Yet the core of Mildred Pierce film isn’t crime drama: Michael Curtiz’s film is, rather, a peculiarly stylish and sour variation on the 1930s weepers about self-made women who are also self-sacrificing mothers (Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas). Any such mother needs a spoilt ingrate of a daughter, and Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) has one in Veda (Ann Blyth), her elder child. (It has to be a daughter rather than a son – the better to emphasise the offspring’s trivial materialism, and in order that she can become her mother’s sexual rival too.) This set-up ensures that Mildred Pierce is only technically a whodunit. Once Veda has appeared on the scene, it’s obvious that she’s not only a selfishly nasty piece of work but also the murderer of her stepfather Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott).
Joan Crawford earns full marks for suffering. Mildred starts to tell her story to a police detective (Moroni Olsen); Crawford is agonised even in the first flashback sequence, when Mildred is still a homebody, though baking and selling cakes and pies to keep the family going because her first husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) is out of work. Bert nevertheless resents what he sees as Mildred’s preoccupation with the couple’s two daughters, the teenage Veda and ten-year-old Kay (Jo Anne Marlow). He worries that his wife is encouraging Veda’s precocious social-climbing tendencies. The Pierces separate. To Veda’s ashamed horror, the best job her mother can find is waitressing but Mildred’s hard work and strength of ambition for her daughter to live the good life ensure rapid progress. Mildred is soon running her own restaurant then the owner of a chain, ably assisted by her friend Ida (Eve Arden). Buzzing around the restaurant, Joan Crawford is dynamic, to put it mildly. (She’d put many a diner off a return visit.) For the most part, though, she’s primed to react to Veda’s serial treacheries, which come thick and fast. Crawford’s tortured mask is magnetic but not much emerges from behind it – or in her inflexible, often toneless voice.
The doom-laden set of Crawford’s face calls to mind the heroine’s expression in numerous Hollywood tales of unrequited love. Mildred Pierce belongs to this genre but with the object of adoration the protagonist’s child rather than a man. As Veda, toothy, moon-faced Ann Blyth is remarkably unappealing (and monotonous) but, after Crawford, she’s the film’s least ignorable presence. Mildred Pierce is at its best when at its most floridly melodramatic. In a home-truths-telling showdown between mother and daughter, Ann Blyth says such hateful things that you’re waiting for – to be honest, willing – Joan Crawford to slap her face. It doesn’t happen and Blyth walks off in the direction of the staircase. ‘Veda!’ yells Crawford and here at least her voice is extraordinary – resounding yet strangled. The set-to continues on the stairs until, in a shock climax, the face slap arrives and it’s Mildred on the receiving end. There is a good daughter to compensate for Veda but not for long. The signs aren’t promising when Bert takes the two girls away for a weekend and Kay coughs twice shortly before departure. Sure enough, she’s dead from pneumonia a day or so later.
The face of Zachary Scott, as the impecunious aristocrat-playboy Monte Beragon, suggests an only somewhat animated version of one of those old cigarette cards of Hollywood stars. In a marriage of convenience (social for her, financial for him), Monte becomes Mildred’s second husband, and Veda’s secret lover. Scott and Ann Blyth are both, in their different ways, so weird that the idea of this liaison really is queasy. The screenplay by Ranald MacDougall contains an odd mixture of standard corny dialogue and arch, cynical quips, the latter tossed off by the likes of Monte and the straight-talking, unillusioned Ida. Although she’s given too many of these wisecracks, Eve Arden delivers them expertly and entertainingly. Jack Carson is good as Wally Fay, an unscrupulous business partner (first of boring Bert, then of Mildred). One of the most likeable contributions is an uncredited cameo from Garry Owen, as a wry policeman who dissuades Mildred from jumping off a bridge. Butterfly McQueen is the maid Lottie. What McQueen is asked to do is infuriating – and more starkly racist because she’s the only African-American character in the film. Yet a fair number of people in NFT3 found this routine chuckle-worthy.
8 May 2017
