Mildred

Joan Crawford was always good at playing a victim. A victim of love, circumstance, mental illness, mean sisters and mean daughters. In Mildred Pierce she is great at playing the victim—a victim of love and of a mean daughter. This was her first picture at Warner Brothers after being let go by MGM. Oh brother, did she ever slap the face of the lion when she got her Best Actress Oscar for this performance.

Poor Mildred. Her husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) does not support his family all that well and is probably cheating on her. She takes on extra work, baking pies to pay for her two daughters’ piano lessons. This is something her husband takes as an insult to his ability to provide. While Mildred spoils her daughters, particularly her older daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), Bert admits he is having an affair as he makes his exit. Now Mildred must be the sole support of her two daughters.

Struggling to find any work, she stumbles upon a waitress job. There she meets the wry, wise-cracking Ida Corwin (Eve Arden) who manages the restaurant. The restaurant starts buying Mildred’s pies, which become famous. Mildred becomes successful with her pies, which leads to her desire to open her own restaurant. Old friend and leech Wally (the under appreciated Jack Carson) finds a property owned by the local wealthy playboy Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Monte is smitten with Mildred and becomes her benefactor and her lover. With the help of her maid Lottie (Butterfly McQueen), Ida and her pies,” Mildred’s” is successful.

What leads our heroine to her downfall is an affair that Monte has with someone a little too close to Mildred’s home. There are other tragic events and road blocks to happiness facing Mildred, events that make her even more of a victim, which I won’t go into here as it might spoil the fun of seeing the movie. There is also some of the meanest dialogue ever to come out of an ungrateful daughter’s mouth and ever put on screen. It is almost as if this was the beginning of the greatest period of tawdry melodramas in Hollywood.

We watched this film on a fairly regular basis in the store. It is a lot of fun and it is a good picture. It was produced by the Warner Brothers “factory,” but they usually made a fine product. Director Michael Curtiz was one of the greatest directors who ever yelled “action” in a thick, Eastern-European accent. Joan Crawford did not win the Oscar for nothing. Her performance is, for lack of a better description, exceedingly smooth: even with the potential for histrionics, she never goes there. She allows the tragic events and the humiliations to pile on to the point where we might say, “Oy, how much more of this can she take?”

If you have never seen this picture, now is your time. As I used to say in the store, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.” New being the operative word. I also used to tell the younger people that black and white was an artistic choice. The reality was that color was more expensive and I have read that Harry and Jack Warner were frugal (I am toning down the description of the Warner brothers for the kids).

Even though this film is sixty-two-years old, there is material that some might consider not suitable for younger viewers. I often forget that I saw these movies on television back in the 60’s and I probably saw things that I did not understand or were entirely inappropriate for a kid under ten to see. Also, every TV in my house was black and white, so my generation accepted black and white movies. In fact there were movies that were in color but I had only seen them in black and white. This is a situation not uncommon to people my age. I cannot tell you how many times we would be watching some older Technicolor picture in the store and a customer would say that the movie had been “colorized” because he or she remembered seeing it in black and white when they were a kid. I would always ask if they saw it on TV at home and whether or not they had a color or black and white TV. Ah ha, they had a black and white set. If a kid is open minded enough not to care if a movie is in color or not, you are a lucky parent.

Sunday March 23rd at 9:30PMon Turner Classic Movies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Tawdry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.