Under Michael Curtiz' direction, James M. Cain's tale of a mother's obsessive love for her daughter was a disquieting mixture of thirties and forties film styles: the suspicious, unsettling world of film noir intertwined with the open, daylit world of melodrama. Although the film opens as a whodunit (who done killed Mildred Pierce's husband), as the story unfolds, told by Mildred in flashback, the murder emerges as one of many interconnected crimes, born not of physical violence but of emotional and psychological needs-crimes rooted in family and work relationships. It is in its emphasis on these two spheres that Mildred Pierce is a product of its time. In 1945, as World War II was ending and the returning soldiers were anxious to get back to work, Mildred Pierce as housewife turned baker, waitress and restaurant-chain owner was the cinematic representation of female financial independence standing in the way of the conversion to a male-dominated, postwar economy. It is for this, more than for her family "failures," that Mildred is indicted. Kathy Geritz