Cast: Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth
Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Runtime: 111 mins
Genre: Drama/Noir
Country: USA
Film noir, to quote James Brown, is "a man's man's man's world". Tough-nut men in trilby hats wisecracking hard-boiled dialogue, toting guns, fighting gangsters and sucking up cigarettes like there's no tomorrow. Women in this genre are either femme fatales or subjects of abuse. So it's surprising, then, that Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce designates a woman at the centre of this 1940s noir picture, which essentially mashes up film noir with women's weepie, a concoction that went on be lauded as the "definitive women's noir". This is a giant blunder. For all Mildred Pierce's dramatic tension and Hollywood sheen, it feels derivative and most of all, manipulative. Here is a tale of a titular mother's resilience and self-sacrifice told in flashback, as a fur-coated Joan Crawford tells her story in a police investigation after the murder of her wealthy second-husband. It turns out that the actual truth is an elaborate set-up of a mother's cover-up and her daughter's betrayal, a mother so engrossed in her own restaurant career that she fails to recognise her own daughter stealing her husband just right under her nose. Mildred Pierce has been a part of the 1940's feminist discourse, but if feminism means establishing a solid womanly professional career whilst sacrificing the moralities of your underlings, then Mrs. Pierce is completely deluded and self-possessed, her ineptness in raising children masquerading as devotion.
The biggest flaw here is the titular character, so wrongly drawn despite of the transformation Joan Crawford has to go through (not that she needs it - her Hollywood image is very linked to old-school glamour), from lowly, dowdy suburban wife to glamourpuss restauranteur. Okay, Mildred Pierce is a hardworking woman, a sacrificial mother who wanted to provide the best of her children, pursued her career by starting as a waitress who went on to open five restaurants, which all resulted to the downfall of her spoilt-rotten daughter Veda (a terrific 17-year old Ann Blyth, who almost eclipses Crawford in this with her ice-cold bitchiness) - but somehow in the end, you're thinking who to really blame. Is it the daughter, calculating, greedy and sordid? Or the mother, who feeds material conformities to her children, fails to discipline them and remains mindlessly oblivious to her daughter's affairs, until to the very last clinch?
The entire film, in film noir fashion, is framed with the final climax bookending both ends, with Mildred contemplating suicide on a harbour with a gun in her pocket. This feels like a plot contrivance, a deux ex machina to keep the final twist from audience's attention, and not because her character really means to commit suicide. Michael Curtiz, famed director for Casablanca, does a professional job for providing aesthetic finesse to the picture, all signature noir lighting and polished cinematography. It falls however in Max Steiner's choice in musical scoring, recycling every bit of the melodramatic orchestra in his Now,Voyager theme every time Mildred scores with a man. Nevertheless, let's wrap with the main woman of the show. In this performance, Crawford did not only win as much as clawed her way to her first Oscar, which she wanted very badly after a career comatose, preceding her transfer from MGM to Warner Bros. She may be Mildred Pierce, but Pierce looks and moves like Crawford, replete with a glamorised stiffness. It's a performance as overrated as this film. No wonder why Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck turned down this role.
What is touted to be a "definitive women's noir picture" turns out to be a faux pas, a faulty Hollywood representation of a resilient, self-sacrificing mother. Despite Curtiz's prestige direction, this is a manipulative, melodramatic blunder that barely goes skin-deep. Crawford is as overrated as the film, and compared to other sterling, more complex women-centric noir pictures Double Indemnity and The Letter, Mildred Pierce pales in comparison.
Review by The Moviejerk © Janz
