Mildred Pierce

For other uses, see Mildred Pierce (disambiguation).

Mildred Pierce
First-edition cover (1941)
Author(s)	James M. Cain
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Hardboiled
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	1941
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
ISBN	NA
OCLC Number	2714770

Mildred Pierce is a 1941 hardboiled novel by James M. Cain. It was made into an Oscar-winning 1945 film starring Joan Crawford and a 2011 Emmy-winning miniseries starring Kate Winslet.

Plot

Set in Glendale, California, in the 1930s, the book is the story of middle-class housewife Mildred Pierce's attempts to maintain her and her family's social position during the Great Depression.

Mildred separates from her unfaithful, unemployed husband and sets out to support herself and her children. After a difficult search she finds a job as a waitress, but she worries that it is beneath her middle-class station. More than that, she worries that her ambitious and increasingly pretentious elder daughter, Veda, will think her new job demeaning. Mildred encounters both success and failure as she opens three successful restaurants, operates a pie-selling business and copes with the death of her younger daughter, Ray. Veda enjoys her mother's newfound financial success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother while openly condemning her and anyone who must work for a living.

When Mildred discovers her daughter's plot to blackmail a wealthy family with a fake pregnancy, she kicks her out of their house. Veda, who has been training to become an opera singer, goes on to a great deal of fame as Mildred convinces her new boyfriend Monty (a young man who, like Mildred, lost his family's wealth at the start of the Great Depression) to help reconcile them. Unfortunately for Mildred, this means buying Monty's family estate and using her earnings to pay for Veda's extravagances. Mildred and Monty marry, but things go sour for her: Wally, her partner in the restaurant business, has discovered that her living like a rich person has dramatically affected the company's profits. He threatens a coup to force her out of the company. This causes her to confess to her ex-husband Bert that she has been embezzling money from her company in order to buy Veda's love.

Needing some of Veda's money to balance the books - and fearing that Wally might target the girl's assets if they are exposed - Mildred goes to her house to confront her. She finds Veda in bed with her stepfather. Monty explains to Mildred that he's leaving her for Veda, who gloats that they've been planning this all along. Mildred snaps, brutally attacking and apparently strangling her daughter, who now appears incapable of singing.

Weeks pass as Mildred moves to Reno, Nevada to establish residency in order to get a speedy divorce from Monty. Bert moves out to visit her. Mildred ultimately is forced to resign from her business empire, leaving it to Wally and Mildred's assistant Ida. Bert and Mildred, upon the finalization of her divorce, remarry. They are shocked when Veda shows up with several dozen reporters to "reconcile" with her mother (a move designed to defuse the negative publicity of her sleeping with her stepfather). Mildred accepts, but several months later, Veda reveals over breakfast on Christmas morning that her voice has healed and announces that she is moving to New York with Monty. As she leaves the house, a broken Mildred agrees to say "to hell" with the monstrous Veda and to "get stinko" with Bert.

Characters

• Mildred Pierce – middle-class mother of two
• Bert Pierce – Mildred's husband
• Moire ("Ray") and Veda Pierce – Mildred's daughters
• Wally Burgan – Bert's former business partner
• Monty Beragon – wealthy playboy and Mildred's lover
• Lucy Gessler – Mildred's friend

Adaptations

1945

Main article: Mildred Pierce (film)

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

Mildred Pierce is a classic postwar film noir with elements of the melodrama or "weeper"; it was structured as a typical murder mystery told in flashbacks. The family melodrama was significantly modified from its original source because of pressures from the Motion Picture Production Code regarding its sordid nature, specifically the behavior of the dissolute playboy character, Monty, who initiates a quasi-incestuous romance with his stepdaughter, Veda. At the same time, however, the screenwriters made violence much more central to the plot than it was in Cain's novel.

Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz had already directed films of many different 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). Curtiz reluctantly began filming with Crawford, who had a reputation for being mannered and difficult, but he was pleasantly surprised by her performance. The role was always considered for Crawford, but at certain stages also for Ann Sheridan.

This film was a tremendous box-office hit and critical success, and was adapted by Ranald MacDougall, Catherine Turney, and William Faulkner from Cain's novel. [Cain wrote novellas that provided source material for two other film-noir classics: his novella The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), filmed in 1946, and the novella, Double Indemnity (1936), filmed in 1944.] Atypical of films noir, the protagonist in the film is female, but she is conventionally brought down by a femme fatale, in this case, her own daughter. Successful promotional copy for the film read: "Mildred Pierce – don't ever tell anyone what she did."

The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Eve Arden and Ann Blyth, both with their only career nominations), Best Screenplay (Ranald MacDougall), and Best Black-and-white Cinematography (Ernest Haller, who shared the Color Cinematography Oscar for Gone with the Wind (1939). Crawford won the film's sole Academy Award as Best Actress. It was her sole win out of three career nominations.

2011

Main article: Mildred Pierce (TV miniseries)

In April 2010, director Todd Haynes began shooting a five-part miniseries with Kate Winslet as Mildred, Guy Pearce as Monty Beragon, and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda. Haynes wrote the period piece with Jon Raymond, and also served as an executive producer with Pamela Koffler, John Wells, Ilene S. Landress and Christine Vachon, along with HBO in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The miniseries first aired on HBO, starting on March 27, 2011, and ending with a two-part finale on April 10, 2011. It differs from the movie version, staying more faithful to the book's original story.

See also

Novels portal

• 1941 in literature

References

• Warner Brothers Archives, http://www.usc.edu/libraries/collections/warner_bros/. A list of actresses drawn up by producer Jerry Wald shows Crawford's name at the top of a list of actresses mentioned for the role in 1942. In the file for Mildred Pierce, neither Bette Davis nor Barbara Stanwyck's names are mentioned for the role at any stage. Ann Sheridan's name came up when negotiations with Crawford broke down in 1944 during her first year at Warner Bros.