This week Steve Hayes reviews another (212) favorite "Mildred Pierce," which won Joan Crawford her long-sought-after Academy Award for best actress in 1945.Steve says: In 1945 Joan Crawford's career at Warner Brothers was in trouble and producer Jerry Wald came to the rescue. He hired screenwriter Ranald MacDougall to tailor "Mildred Pierce," a sordid novel of mother love by James M. Cain, into a vehicle for the star. Following the success the previous year of "Double Indemnity," also based on a book by Cain, MacDougall added a murder, thus combining two genres, "The Woman's Picture" and Film Noir. This resulted in a gripping story of mother love mixed with murder and brought Crawford her only Oscar as best actress. Sixteen-year-old Ann Blythe makes a vivid screen debut as the vicious daughter Veda and Eve Arden scores as Ida, Mildred's friend and confidante, who's wisecracks bring some much needed levity to the proceedings. The lighting, the pacing and the editing are classic noir, while the story is a typical "self-sacrificing mother yarn" with a dash of Freud. Mildred is the kind of mother who is willing to do anything to give her child what she doesn't have. Not knowing that what her daughter lacks most is a heart and a conscience. It's fast paced, loaded with melodrama and most of all; it's Joan, doing what she does best. It's "Classic Crawford"!
2 comments:
James Cain's novel Mildred Pierce is actually much more complex than the beloved Crawford film; when I read it, I was sorry so much was left out of that movie. Good news -- Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) is adapting it into an HBO mini series, with Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce.
When I watch old movies at home, I always have imdb on my laptop checking out the actors to see what life had in store for them. When I saw MP a couple of years one thing that struck me was that in the movie she had 2 husbands. In real life one of the actors, Zachary Scott, lived to be only 51, while the other, Bruce Bennett, had almost twice the life, reaching 100.
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