Mildred Pierce (1945) review
A cop looks suspiciously at Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce.
Mildred Pierce (1945) is like a black-and-white Balzac story set in 1940s L.A.
The intricacies of bourgeois society, work, status, the interests, the families, justice, crime, marriage and divorce: everything is traversed by money and an irresistible impetus to climb that social ladder and "make it". Such a trajectory leaves blood, feuds and indelible emotional scars. You can’t make it without some irreparable tragedy.
The types of a bourgeois society: the sleezy fast talkers, the honest, unlucky businessman, the hard working, austere Calvinist, the corrupt, the envious––– they’re all there. Especially, through Joan Crawford's title character, the film focuses on the role of women in this society. Here's one tough chameleon lady: she goes from Norman Rockwell-esque housewife to hard-working single mother and, then, restaurant-chain owner, with business interests all over town. All this done by herself with extreme resourcefulness, in such austere and devoted fashion that it looks like dignity (and might well be), but certainly smells like Calvinism.
Her motivation is well known: give a better life for her children. Her predicament is well known as well: success in everything material brings wreckage to the emotional sphere. It's bookkeeping over love for Mildred. She's unlucky with husbands and love. Her younger child dies when she's away in a love nest. Finally, her relationship with her older daughter tastes as bitter as a mix of ingratitude, overindulgence and sexual envy would.
In her understandable desperation for getting ahead in life and providing for her children, Mildred equates money with love. Veda Pierce (Ann Blyth), the older daughter, a graceless petit bourgeois with delusions of aristocratic grandeur, accuses her mother of degrading herself and the family by working as a waitress. It's easy to condemn Veda’s ingratitude for the woman who not only bore her but also bought and paid everything she has. The movie, in fact, does exactly this, and rather superficially, as if Veda Pierce had simply fell from the skies, without considering whence such attitude comes from.
And it comes from her mother's bourgeois ethics: in raising her children, Mildred inadvertently monetizes love and affection, and realizes too late that such an upbringing is a two-way street—filial love and respect, once they come with a price tag, become as fleeting and fickle as any other product, exchangeable and doomed to fatigue.
Veda ends up seducing her mother's second husband, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). This happens in the best families, of course. And in so doing Veda betrays a consuming jealousy of, first, her mother's sexual exuberance and class (even on an apron) vis-a-vis her poorly disguised dollar day manners; second, of Mildred's talent, something which she is drastically in absence.
Monte Beragon is a failing aristocrat and shares a certain attitude with Veda Pierce: they have very little regard for work and haven't understood, since they're short on smarts also, that in a bourgeois society, in order to have a ball, somebody has to work, and usually that’s a person very close to you, unlike in aristocratic and slave societies. And that's the reason they both resent Mildred, for she is that working somebody. There's something about a hard-working, independent and successful divorcée that these people find insufferable. And something about being such a woman that Mildred herself cannot handle, eventually bringing ruin to her house. In the end, she loses her two daughters, her two husbands and her beloved restaurant-chain: you just can’t win in a film noir.
Balzac has a lawyer say in the final passage of Colonel Chabert that in modern society lawyers, priests and doctors are the only ones who cannot, in any way, think well of the world, for they are obliged to deal with its interstices, be it the body, the soul or the estate. Lawyers are the worse, of course, for a person’s estate sets off endless family intrigues and disputes which truly unveil the realities of bourgeois society, beneath all its ideological façades.
Mildred Pierce does in film the same vivisection of the bourgeoisie that Balzac does in ink, only it endorses (or attempts to) a different perspective: that of a liberal bourgeois. Whereas Balzac was notoriously reactionary and preferred the old aristocratic ways over the new money-ridden quid pro quos of the emerging Parisian bourgeoisie, Mildred Pierce values the charmless work ethic of the American bourgeoisie, the self-made (wo)man creed, pointing its critical artillery against workless decadence.
However they do agree that in our society all will be resolved, by and by, at the courts: a standard criminal procedure in Mildred Pierce – murder – unravels the general sordidness. Just as in Balzac the settling of a estate unravels the true driving forces behind the social masks. These people of bourgeois societies can’t live without making contracts— and can't stop breaking them also.
