Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford--after an absence of almost three years--triumphantly returned to the screen as Mildred Pierce in Warner Brothers’ adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel of a mother’s obsessive love for her daughter. Under Michael Curtiz’ direction, Mildred Pierce was a disquieting mixture of ‘30s and ‘40s 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’s husband), as the story unfolds--told by Mildred Pierce in a series of flashbacks--the murder emerges as one of many interconnected crimes: crimes born, not of physical violence, but rather 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. Filmed in 1945, as World War II was ending and the soldiers were returning home 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 conversion to a postwar (male-dominated) economy. It is for this, more than for her family ‘failures’, that she is indicted.