Mildred Pierce: Movie & DVD Review

"Mildred Pierce"
Directed by Michael Curtiz, written by Ranald MacDougall, 115 minutes, not rated.

Nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress, Michael Curtiz’s 1945 noir classic, "Mildred Pierce," features a great, Oscar-winning comeback by its star, Joan Crawford, who was fired by MGM and voted box-office poison before filming began.

Not willing to take that pill lying down, Crawford, ever the workhorse, pulled herself together, signed with Warner Bros., and set out to prove the world wrong. She did so, too, heaving and sighing her way through one of the finest performances of her career.

Based on a screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, the film is smart and brisk, just soapy enough to be as tragic as it is fun. It’s one of the best movies made by Crawford, who is perhaps better known by contemporary audiences for her daughter’s corrosive biography, “Mommie Dearest,” and the subsequent film based on it, than for her 50-year career in Hollywood.

Considering some of the entertaining movies Crawford made, from “The Women,” “Humoresque” and “Sudden Fear” to “Female on the Beach,” “Johnny Guitar” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” that’s especially unfortunate, but such is the power of a disgruntled daughter with an ax to grind and a public hungry for scandal.

Structured like “Citizen Kane,” with plot elements reminiscent of the maternal self-sacrifice of “Imitation of Life” and “Stella Dallas,” “Mildred Pierce” finds Crawford giving one of her signature, blighted-by-love performances as Mildred, a tough soul saddled with a rotten, money-hungry daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth); a bum ex-husband, Bert (Bruce Bennett); and Monte (Zachary Scott), the debonair playboy she marries for love.

Determined to give the hateful Veda the best that money can buy, Mildred scratches and claws her way to the top of the eatery business. She does so with the help of Wally Fay (Jack Carson), a realtor who wants to get Mildred into bed, and the pluckish Ida (Eve Arden), who teaches Mildred the business of shucking food.

When Mildred hits it big with her popular chain of restaurants, murder strikes and darkens her high, with Monte gunned down in a hail of bullets and Mildred standing tall over the hotplate as the chief suspect. Did she do it? And if so, why? In high style, Curtiz (“Casablanca”) serves up the mystery, with Max Steiner’s busy, masculine score promising great things--and delivering.

Based on James M. Cain’s potboiler, the film is pure chicken-fried gravy, a polished, well-acted melodrama peppered with enough tough-as-nails dialogue to seal a coffin. Even its advertising campaign was a hoot, boasting that Crawford had 14 apron and 21 house dress changes—“a new kind of record for one of the screen’s most glamorous personalities!” Indeed.

It’s tough to live up to that kind of hype, but “Mildred Pierce” follows through with aplomb.

Grade: A