Mildred Pierce
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| Mildred Pierce | |
 1st edition cover |
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| Author | James M. Cain |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Hardboiled |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Publication date | 1941 |
| Media type | print (hardback & paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
Mildred Pierce is a novel (1941) by James M. Cain. It was made into an Oscar-winning feature film starring Joan Crawford.
[edit] Characters
- Mildred Pierce – middle-class mother of two
- Bert Pierce – husband of Mildred
- Moire ("Kay") and Veda Pierce – daughters of Mildred
- Wally Burgan – former business partner of Bert
- Monty Beragon – wealthy playboy and Mildred's lover
- Ida Corwin – friend of Mildred
[edit] Plot summary
Set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Mildred Pierce is the story of a middle-class, single mother's attempt to maintain her and her family's social position during the Great Depression. Frustrated by her unemployed husband, and worried by their dwindling finances, Mildred separates from him and sets out to support herself and her children on her own.
After a difficult search, she finally finds a job as a waitress, but she worries that it is beneath her middle-class station. Actually, Mildred worries more that her ambitious elder daughter, Veda, will think her new job is demeaning. Mildred encounters both success and tragedy, opening five successful restaurants and coping with the death of her younger daughter, Kay. Veda happily enjoys Mildred's newfound financial success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother and letting her contempt for people who must work for a living be known. Mildred's attachment to Veda forms the central tragedy of the novel.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
In 1945, the novel was made into a film starring Joan Crawford, Eve Arden, Ann Blyth, Jack Carson, Bruce Bennett, Zachary Scott, and Lee Patrick.
Mildred Pierce is a classic postwar film noir with elements of the melodrama or 'weeper'; it was structured as a typical murder mystery told in flashbacks. The family melodrama was significantly modified from its original source due to pressures from the Hays Office regarding its sordid nature, specifically, the behavior of the dissolute playboy character, Monty, in initiating a (quasi-incestuous) romance with his wife's daughter (by a previous marriage).
Versatile Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz had already directed films of many different genres, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Dodge City (1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and This is the Army (1943). Curtiz reluctantly began filming with the 'has-been', Joan Crawford, who had developed a reputation for being mannered and difficult, but he was pleasantly surprised when she delivered one of the best performances of her career. (The role was first considered by Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ann Sheridan.)
This film, a tremendous box office hit and critical success, was an adaptation by Ranald MacDougall, Catherine Turney, and William Faulkner of James M. Cain's 1941 'hard-boiled' novel of the same name. Cain's book was a satire about bourgeois values and a tale of poor parenthood. (Cain wrote novellas that provided source material for two other film-noir classics: his 1934 novella The Postman Always Rings Twice, filmed in 1946, and the 1936 novella, Double Indemnity, filmed in 1944.) Atypical of films noirs, the protagonist in the film is female, but she is conventionally brought down by a femme fatale, in this case, her own daughter. The murder story is told as a flashback. Successful promotional copy for the film read: "Mildred Pierce — don't ever tell anyone what she did."
The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Eve Arden and Ann Blyth, both with their only career nominations), Best Screenplay (Ranald MacDougall), and Best Black-and-white Cinematography (Ernest Haller, who shared the Color Cinematography Oscar for Gone with the Wind in 1939.) Crawford won the film's sole Academy Award as Best Actress. It was her sole win out of three career nominations.
The title character is a hard-working, neurotically-devoted, long-suffering and determined mother who has a status-seeking, spoiled, detestable, mean-spirited, and unloving daughter named Veda (Ann Blyth). (Mirroring this film role, Joan Crawford, in real life, supported herself as a waitress and saleswoman before she began making films.) Mildred's ruinous but noble downfall is the result of poor choices of men (including her dull, middle-class, real-estate agent husband, Bert (Bruce Bennett)), and her obsessive doting on an ungrateful Veda. (Other films of maternal self-sacrifice for an insufferable child - before this one - include Imitation of Life (1934) with Claudette Colbert, and Stella Dallas (1937) with Barbara Stanwyck, and later would include Terms of Endearment (1983) with Shirley MacLaine.) Although Mildred's maternal sacrifice is portrayed as noble, some have claimed that the film is cautionary and antifeminist, with Mildred presented as a typical 1940s postwar housewife whose American-dream-fulfilling, role-switching, movement from suburban, middle-class homemaker to divorced, successful, business entrepreneur (as the owner of a chain of restaurants) results in corruption, destruction, and disaster, both financial and personal. This was symbolized in the film in movements from bright, daytime Southern California scenes to dark, criminal, nightmarish scenes.
