Mildred Pierce (Warner Bros., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Funny Girl TCM showed the 1945 Warner Bros. melodrama Mildred Pierce, based on a 1941 novel by James M. Cain that had to be drastically remodeled to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code Administration. Cain’s novel – on which he worked off and on for nine years, at least partly because he chose to tell it in the third person whereas all his previous books had been first-person – told the story of Mildred Pierce, a woman whose husband Bert loses his job in the middle of the Great Depression. She’s determined to raise their two children, daughters Veda and Ray (called “Kay” in the 1945 film and played by Jo Ann Marlowe) as a single mother and ultimately lucks into a job as a restaurant waitress. Veda Pierce regards waitressing as beneath her family’s dignity but Mildred works her way up in the restaurant business, eventually opening a restaurant of her own and then building on it to create a three-restaurant chain. Veda is studying for a career as an opera singer (Cain himself had trained as a baritone and at least three other stories besides Mildred Pierce – Serenade [1937], Career in C Major (1938), and The Moth [1948] – involved opera in their plots), while younger daughter Ray dies as a child. Ultimately Mildred starts losing money – the restaurants are doing well but Mildred starts siphoning money, first legally and then illegally, to pay for Veda’s extravagances – and in order to save her business she agrees to marry her former boyfriend Monte Beragon. Caught by Wally Burgan, her former partner and briefly lover between her separation from Bert and her marriage to Monty (and played in the film by the insufferably boorish Jack Carson, who for some reason gets second billing), Mildred confronts Veda and demands the return of some of the money Mildred has lavished on Veda over the years. Unfortunately, Mildred catches Veda in bed with her stepfather Monte Beragon, and Mildred responds by strangling Veda. Veda survives but apparently loses her voice, and Mildred moves to Reno to establish residency for a quick divorce from Monte. Then Veda makes a vocal comeback and it’s revealed that she didn’t really lose her voice; she just said she did to get out of her existing contract and sign a new one with more money. Mildred and her first husband Bert, Veda’s father, reconcile and get drunk at the latest example of Veda’s ungrateful and bitchy behavior.

James M. Cain’s stories posed a quandary for filmmakers in the 1940’s; they were incredibly popular but also almost impossible to film within the guidelines of the Production Code. Fortunately, director Billy Wilder was able to get Double Indemnity (book 1935, film 1944) on the screen in a Production Code-safe manner, and in quick succession MGM filmed Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946 and Warner Bros. took on Mildred Pierce. Producer Jerry Wald hit on an ingenious solution to the task of making Mildred Pierce Production Code-safe: he decided that Veda would murder Monte at the start of the film. We would see the murder in the opening frames but not be shown whodunit until the end, and along the way the finger of suspicion would point to Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) and Mildred herself (Joan Crawford) before finally landing on Veda’s (Ann Blyth) slender shoulders. Mildred would narrate the story in an interrogation with police inspector Peterson (Moroni Olsen) – thereby ironically bringing the story closer to Cain’s earlier first-person novels – and we would watch the rise and fall of Mildred’s restaurant business and her growing frustration with Veda. It didn’t take long for Jerry Wald to realize that Mildred Pierce demanded two quite different writing styles, half soap opera and half film noir, and though he cycled quite a number of writers through the project (including William Faulkner, Margaret Gruen, future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Albert Maltz, Louise Randall Person, Margaret Buell Wilder and Thames Williamson), ultimately he used Catherine Turney for the soap-opera scenes and Ranald MacDougall (who ended up with sole credit) for the noir parts. Also, much to Cain’s displeasure, Wald and his writers eliminated opera as a plot element, though Veda is still a music student (she studies Chopin’s “Valse Brillante” on piano) and later gets a job singing pop songs at a sleazy bar. Wald also had a hard time casting Mildred; ordinarily a part like that would have gone to Warners’ resident bitch, Bette Davis, but she turned it down and probably regretted it when her bitter rival Joan Crawford not only got the part but won the Academy Award for it. Also it’s hard these days to watch a film in which Crawford plays a bitch-goddess mother after her adoptive daughter Christina’s memoir Mommie Dearest and what it told us (true or otherwise) about her real-life parenting strategies.

Crawford made Mildred Pierce at a crucial juncture in her career; she’d been under contract to MGM for nearly 20 years when they abruptly dropped her after the financial failure of her 1942 film Above Suspicion. (This was a film in which she co-starred with Fred MacMurray as an American tourist couple being exploited by British intelligence to take pictures of Nazi German military installations under the guise of just being tourists. Ironically, both MacMurray and Crawford would make major comebacks after this film, and both in stories by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.) She had just signed with Warners and for her first film there they cast her as herself in Hollywood Canteen, in which she appeared with Bette Davis for the first time even though they had no scenes together. Then they reluctantly gave her Mildred Pierce – and she ran with it. It was a part that drew on much of her previous work – many of her MGM films also had cast her as a woman of modest means who rose up the socioeconomic ladder out of sheer grit, determination and an ability to latch onto wealthy but basically honest men – while also giving her an entrée into film noir. Crawford would stay at Warner Bros. for seven more years, and many of her films there – Possessed (1946; she’d also made a film called Possessed at MGM in 1931 but the two had totally different plots), Daisy Kenyon (1947, on loan to 20th Century-Fox), Flamingo Road (1949), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), were gangster films or noirs. Once Warners released Crawford and she had to adjust to making movies in the brave new world of post-studio system Hollywood, she triumphed with yet another noir, Sudden Fear (1952). Mildred Pierce is a triumph of the Hollywood studio system and the cool professionalism with which Warner Bros. in particular could churn out this sort of story; it was superbly directed by Michael Curtiz (who tends to get neglected by the auteur critics because he had such easy-seeming command of many different film genres, though he made Casablanca and quite a few other great films) and vividly photographed by Ernest Haller with an easy mastery of both the soap-opera and film noir looks. And Crawford’s Academy Award was fully deserved, even though in an ideal world she’d have won it four years earlier for A Woman’s Face, made by an even greater filmmaker (George Cukor) and a movie that “stretched” her much more than this one did.