Reviews Aug 05 2008 @ 08:00 am
REVIEW: Mildred Pierce
Directed By: Michael Curtiz
Written By: James M. Cain (novel) and Ranald MacDougall and William Faulkner (uncredited) and Catherine Turney (uncredited)
Starring: Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Ann Blyth
Running Time: 111 minutes
Not Rated
Note: Graham Culbertson is the proprietor of Movies et al, where he skewers Hollywood pretension and self-deprecatingly acknowledges his cinematic ‘misses’ in the fantastic Film Ignorance column. Head on over, but be sure to leave your Keanu Reeves love at the door.
Michael Curtiz may not have been one of the greatest Hollywood directors; he was certainly no Hawks or Ford. But he was an excellent director who made more than his share of great films, and produced one movie that anyone, from any era, would be proud of: Casablanca. To that elite list of unchallenged masterpieces, I’d like to add a second film: Mildred Pierce.
Based on a novel by James Cain, the author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce is a classic genre mashup. In the canonical noir films, there’s a femme fatale who can bend everyone to their will, an alluring woman whose charm is inescapable. In the canonical 30s and 40s melodrama, there’s a lost mother who will give everything for her children, and ultimately must sacrifice herself for her children’s happiness. Mildred Pierce does something brilliant, yet so simple that it’s a wonder it was never done before. Joan Crawford, in the title role, is a femme fatale who is also a self-sacrificing mother. The plot threads of the noir and the melodrama come together, intertwine, and double up, and the result is a noir as fine as The Maltese Falcon and a melodrama as moving as Stella Dallas. It’s hard to ask for much more.
Allmovie notes: “His detractors have noted that Curtiz’s much-praised visual style was due more to Warner’s team of cinematographers and art directors than to the director himself.” I can’t speak for the accuracy of those statements, but I can tell you that the cinematography and art direction in this movie are pitch perfect. We begin at the end: a man is shot, calling out “Mildred” as he falls, and Mildred – femme fataled out in a glamorous fur coat – flees the scene of the crime and, after being interrupted in a suicide attempt, lures an old flame back to the beach house to take the rap. The house takes on the funhouse look of the best Welles noirs – striking mise-en-scene lit for a chiaroscuro effect and filmed from unexpected angles.
Eventually, we flash back to the events that lead up to the murders, and the story slowly develops. We see Mildred, decidedly un-fataled out, as a regular housewife dealing with her devoted younger daughter and her spoiled older daughter. A number of men are in play: her deadbeat husband, her husband’s ruthless partner (the patsy), and a rich man who gives both Mildred and her elder daughter a taste of the fine life – who we recognize as the corpse. These people come in and out of Mildred’s life as her tale unfolds itself, as many noirs do, for the ears of the police. The twist is: although she’s tried to set up her first husband’s partner, the police have latched on to the husband as the villain.
As a melodrama, Mildred Pierce is a story of class and a social rise and fall, as Mildred builds her fortune and gives her daughter the best things in life, but is unable to achieve happiness through wealth. As a film noir, Mildred Pierce is a story of degeneration, telegraphed by Mildred’s increasing taste for whiskey and her eventual indulgence in things like the fur coat we see her in initially. Both Hollywood noir and Hollywood melodrama have their roots in the naturalistic literature of the late 19th century (Dreiser, Zola, etc), and thus Mildred Pierce represents a sort of homecoming. The decadence of melodrama and the degeneration of noir are reunited, a double-shot of naturalism that burns like fire going down but gives you a taste for the seedy side of life you won’t ever be free of. I recommend drinking it straight. You won’t regret it.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 10:04 am 1. Sam Juliano said …
Nice work there Graham, and I can’t complain about the rating either–this is classic 40’s melodrama, and indeed as you contend a further example of the pre-eminence of director Michael Curtiz, whose catalogue is always undervalued because of CASABLANCA.
Crawford may have well given her greatest performance here (but Oscar bashers and know-it-alls will always try and choose a lesser-known film) as her tenacity, and to-the-breaking-point loyalty are beautifully conveyed in her mother-at-all-cost demeanor, which is eventually shattered. It is one of American cinema’s most extraordinary performances by an actress. As the manipulative, narcissistic elder daughter Veda, Ann Blyth creates a true human Monster in every sense of the word, and her performance is another screen classic.
Again, a wonderful treatment here, and a worthy inclusion is this terrific film noir series.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 10:11 am 2. Luke Harrington said …
What’s interesting about Pierce is that Veda herself is something of a femme fatale to her mother. Often in maternal melodramas, the child will never fully understand that sacrifice her mother makes for her sake, but in the case of Veda, she understands, then turns around and spits on it and asks for more — knowing fully that her mother’s love will compell her to comply.
Call it “chick noir.”
(And I fully agree on the five stars.)
on Aug 05 2008 @ 10:17 am 3. G said …
Thanks Luke: it means a lot to me have my 5 approved by a MovieZeal writer. Otherwise I was gonna feel guilty about it.
Sam, I can hardly even fathom the one-two punch of Crawford and Blyth in this movie. Both so strong and weak in such different ways, in classic melodrama tradition. And as Luke points out, both femme fatales in a way very, very not in keeping with the melodrama.
Plus, I absolutely love Eve Arden as Mildred’s wise-cracking boss then employee then friend. She’s very good and very funny. That’s three academy award worthy performances in this movie, all by women. That didn’t happen much in the Old Hollywood, but is nigh impossible in today’s boys club. What a treat.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 10:35 am 4. Sam Juliano said …
Indeed, G, indeed. Arden is exceptional, I had forgotten about here–I need to look at this film again soon.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 11:06 am 5. Alexander Coleman said …
Good review, Graham.
I’ve always enjoyed this film. It’s kind of soapy, but so what? The blending of maternal melodrama (The Old Maid, Stella Dallas, The Great Lie, To Each His Own, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, Imitation of Life and That Certain Woman among others) and noir (no list necessary here) is rich and splendid.
The cinematography of this film is divine. And Michael Curtiz has an extremely impressive filmography when you go after it. Whether we’re discussing his Errol Flynn cycle (the great, great grandfather of the action-adventure is his The Adventures of Robin Hood and Dodge City helped create even more “cliches” of the Western) his tremendous noirs (I’m a big fan of another Joan Crawford with him, Flamingo Road, and The Unsuspected).
And I agree that Mildred Pierce’s daughter in this is sort of the real femme fatale, haha.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 6:14 pm 6. films noir said …
A nicely rounded review Graham, which rightly extols the superlative beach-house scenes on the night of the murder, and the stunning film noir photography by cinematographer Ernest Haller.
But I can’t agree that Mildred is a femme-fatale. If she tries to make a patsy of the jerk Wally it is as a desperate mother trying save her worthless daughter. If anything it is the amoral scheming Veda who is a budding femme-fatale and the venal Monte an homme-fatale.
Elementally it is story of family tragedy played out against the pursuit of the California dream of wealth and ease through hard-work and ambition destroyed by wastrel conceit and shameless greed, and is as strong an indictment of the moral corrosiveness of wealth and privilege as Hollywood has achieved.
But it is also a story of profound humanity and the worth of simple decency and personal integrity. Mildred makes tragic mistakes and misplaces her trust and love, but she is always true to herself, and in even in her darkest hour towers above the morass of greed and selfishness that would suck her down.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 6:40 pm 7. Sam Juliano said …
“Films Noir” that is one terrific third paragraph there! Superb analysis.
on Aug 05 2008 @ 8:17 pm 8. films noir said …
Thanks Sam
on Aug 06 2008 @ 7:25 am 9. G said …
Well films, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. No, you’re right, Mildred isn’t a femme fatale at all. But the film spends its first, I don’t know, 106 minutes trying to convince you that she is, so I wasn’t going to say in my review that she wasn’t a femme fatale – especially since this is a less watched film than something like Maltese Falcon. But hopefully no one who hasn’t seen the film will read the commments.
on Aug 06 2008 @ 9:30 pm 10. films noir said …
G, I suppose it would have been better if you had not referred to her as a femme-fatale in the review…
Mildred doesn’t behave as a femme-fatale for 106 minutes, and it is debatable if she ever does. Part of the tension in the story is wanting to know how and why a decent and hard-working woman comes to be implicated in a murder and behave as she does in the first 10 minutes. Let’s not forget, she attempts suicide in that opening sequence, something femme-fatales do only when they are physically cornered and there is no escape.
on Aug 07 2008 @ 6:47 am 11. G said …
Films, I agree with you that she doesn’t act like a femme fatale, after that first sequence. But I would say that the tension in the story comes from wondering how and why a decent and hard-working woman comes to be a femme fatale. It’s not just the murder or even her behavior, it’s also that glorious, glamorous coat. She doesn’t behave like a fatale in the flashbacks, but you know/believe that she will end up one.
As to the suicide attempt, that didn’t bother me, and I certainly don’t believe there’s some hard and fast rule that says you’re disqualified as a femme fatale if you attempt suicide when not physically cornered. I don’t think it makes sense to have such a specific requirement for a remarkably supple and enduring typological figure.
on Aug 07 2008 @ 7:10 pm 12. films noir said …
At the risk of appearing tendentious G, here the glamorous mink is more a wealth motif than a femme-fatale prop. Though I do concede that the mink coat resonates symbolically in noir as the yearning for wealth and ease, and its achievement, for many femme-fatales.
Suicide as a free act to my mind requires a deep capacity for self-criticism and a state of profound existential angst, both of which are beyond the femme-fatale.
on Aug 25 2008 @ 2:53 pm 13. Allan Fish said …
OK, after dissing G’s efforts on his Night of the Hunter piece I went looking for earlier contributions and I have to say I agree with much of what he says here in this excellent piece. On the MZ scale it would be ****½ with me, but I can’t argue with five and he makes some excellent points. His NOTH piece is just a blip. Phew!