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Mildred Pierce is a novel (1941) by James M. Cain. It was made into a feature film starring Joan Crawford.

Characters

• Mildred Pierce – middle-class mother of two (Joan Crawford)
• Bert Pierce – husband of Mildred (Bruce Bennett)
• Ray (Moire) and Veda Pierce – daughters of Mildred (Jo Ann Marlowe and Ann Blyth)
• Wally Fay – business partner of Bert (Jack Carson)
• Monte Beragon – friend of Mildred (Zachary Scott)
• Ida – waitress and friend of Mildred (Eve Arden)

Plot summary

Set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, Mildred Pierce is the story of a middle-class, single mother's attempt to maintain her and her family's social position during the Great Depression. Frustrated by her unemployed, shiftless husband, and worried by their dwindling finances, Mildred separates from him and sets out to support herself and her children on her own. After a difficult search for a job among the ranks of the unemployed, she finally finds one but worries that it is beneath her middle-class station. Actually, Mildred worries more that her ambitious daughter Veda will think her new job beneath her. Veda happily enjoys Mildred's new financial success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother and letting her contempt for people who must work for a living be known. Mildred's attachment to her forms the central tragedy of the novel.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1945, the novel was made into a film starring Joan Crawford, Eve Arden, Ann Blyth, Jack Carson, Bruce Bennett, and Lee Patrick.

Mildred Pierce is a classic, post-war film noir mixed with typical soap operish elements of the woman's melodramatic picture or "weeper," including a strand of a typical murder mystery often told by flashback. The family melodrama was significantly modified from its original source due to pressures of the Production Code regarding its sordidness - namely, the incestual behavior of the dissolute playboy character named Monte.

Famed Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz (who had already directed many diverse film genres, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Dodge City (1939), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk (1940), Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and This is the Army (1943) shaped this significant film in the genre. Curtiz reluctantly began filming with 'has-been' star Joan Crawford, who had developed a reputation for being mannered and difficult, but was pleasantly surprised when she delivered one of the best performances of her career.

This film, a tremendous box-office hit and critical success, was an adaptation by Ranald MacDougall and Catherine Turney (and William Faulkner) of James M. Cain's 1941 'hard-boiled' novel of the same name. Cain's original novel was a satire about bourgeois values, and a tale of poor parenthood. Atypical for film noirs, the main protagonist in the film is a female - but she is typically brought down by a femme fatale - her own daughter. The intriguing murder story is told with a flashback structure reminiscent of Citizen Kane (1941). Successful promotional copy for the film read: "Mildred Pierce - don't ever tell anyone what she did."

The gripping and cynical film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Eve Arden and Ann Blyth, both with their only career nomination), Best Screenplay (Ranald MacDougall), and Best B/W Cinematography (Ernest Haller who had previously co-won the Color Cinematography Oscar for Gone with the Wind (1939). Former MGM star Joan Crawford performed in the melodramatic Warners' film in an astonishing comeback role (and debut role for Warner Bros.) after a two year absence and slumping decline. Crawford won the film's sole Academy Award Oscar (it was also her sole Academy Award win out of three career nominations) as Best Actress for her title role.

The title character is a hard-working, neurotically-devoted, long-suffering and determined mother who has a status-seeking, spoiled, detestable and mean-spirited, unloving daughter named Veda (Ann Blyth). Mildred's ruinous but noble downfall occurs as the result of poor choices of men (including her dull, middle-class broker husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) and her caring for an ungrateful Veda. (Other films of maternal self-sacrifice for an insufferable child - before this one - include Imitation of Life (1934) with Claudette Colbert, and Stella Dallas (1937) with Barbara Stanwyck, and later would include Terms of Endearment (1983) with Shirley MacLaine.) Although Mildred's maternal sacrifice is portrayed as noble, some have claimed that the film is cautionary and anti-feminist, with Mildred presented as a typical 1940s post-war housewife whose 'American dream-fulfilling' role-switching movement from suburban, middle-class home-maker to divorced, successful business entrepreneur (restaurant-chain owner) results in corruptive, destructive disaster (both financial and personal). This was symbolized in the film in movements from bright, daytime S. California scenes to dark, criminal, nightmarish scenes.

• 1941 novels
• American novels