Airing on Sunday, March 20 at 2:00 PM ET
Academy Award for Best Actress (Joan Crawford)
Nominations for Best Picture, Supporting Actress (Eve Arden and Ann Blyth), Screenplay (Ranald MacDougall), Cinematography, Black and White (Ernest Haller)
After two decades in movies, Joan Crawford appeared to have it all: the height of glamor, box office success, A-list leading men (among them Gable, Cooper, Tracy and Montgomery) and top directors like Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner. Granted, her career at MGM had tanked in the early 1940s after a string of mediocre, poorly received films, but she quickly landed back on her feet at Warner Bros. And if there was an uncharacteristic gap of more than two years between pictures (not counting a brief guest spot as herself in the all-star Hollywood Canteen, 1944), it was simply that Crawford was biding her time at the studio until the right project came along. She found it with a role that had been sought by Barbara Stanwyck and allegedly turned down by Crawford’s rival at Warner’s, Queen of the Lot Bette Davis.
What Crawford was missing, what she craved most at this point in her career was respect – the respect of studio executives, directors and other stars – and recognition of her skills as an actress. Mildred Pierce offered the promise of fulfilling that need. The story of a struggling single mom who rises from hardship to become a wealthy restaurant tycoon, only to find tragedy and heartbreak, Crawford saw it as a chance to display a range her earlier films hadn’t afforded her, and she fought for it with her usual dogged determination.
The basic outlines of the character were not all that far from the rags-to-riches “Cinderella” roles of the 1930s that made her an icon for audiences of working women (or as it was known, the “shopgirl set”). But here, she could dial it up with layers of betrayal, deception, blind ambition, misplaced maternal devotion and romantic and sexual intrigue, all while making the transition her most devoted fans expected of her, from spunky lower-class dowdiness to noble suffering swathed in furs. It was as much this amplification of the Crawford image and personal backstory as her performance alone that earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Truth be told, Crawford was all wrong for the role as originally written in James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel of 1941, but so were most of Hollywood’s female stars. Cain’s Mildred is rather vulgar and tasteless, sexual but not glamorous, and by the end of the story, when her desperate schemes to climb the social ladder have come crashing down around her, hard-drinking, overweight and bitter. When Warner Bros. acquired the rights for $15,000 in 1944, the studio immediately set about making the seamy story more acceptable to Production Code censors and more palatable to a mass audience.
This was achieved over the course of many scripts contributed by a string of writers, including Cain himself and novelist William Faulkner (both ultimately deemed unsuitable). Mildred's vulgar expressions and lower middle-class behavior were dropped or softened, and she was made more noble, less a sinner than a victim of circumstance. In the novel, she has an affair with the sexually aggressive Wally Fay, but that was dropped from the movie, and only Wally's dogged but unsuccessful pursuit of her remains. On the other hand, daughter Veda and second husband Monte were made more villainous. Cain had given Veda the saving grace of talent and a passionate devotion to music. In the movie, she still takes music lessons and performs, but it is merely a minor plot detail. And Monte is transformed from a down-at-the-heels society playboy to a more sinister backstabbing gigolo.
Two other additions along the way took the script from routine melodrama to a darker thriller in keeping with the changing tastes of postwar audiences – a murder plot and flashback structure that had worked so well in Billy Wilder’s adaptation of another Cain novel, Double Indemnity (1944). These elements paved the way for more of a typical Warner Bros. film noir treatment of the story that would be enhanced by the moody, evocative lighting and cinematography by Ernest Haller.
But first and foremost, the project needed its Mildred. As a measure of the importance the studio placed on this production, producer Jerry Wald assigned it to one of Warner’s top directors, Michael Curtiz, a recent Oscar winner for Casablanca (1942). Prior to this, Curtiz had been known primarily for his work with the studio’s male stars, notably James Cagney, Erroll Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, although he had also directed Bette Davis in seven movies and would have preferred to make this the eighth. (Davis later claimed she never saw a script, but that seems unlikely, given her status at the studio with first refusal on all "A" projects.) Curtiz was most in favor of Barbara Stanwyck for the title role, so when Wald pushed the idea of Crawford on him, he fumed that she was a "has-been,” and he wouldn't work with "her high-hat airs and her goddammed shoulder pads." Unexpectedly, after nearly 20 years in the business and more than 60 films, Crawford humbled herself and agreed to do a screen test. Curtiz liked what he saw and cautiously went with the casting decision.
Mildred Pierce began filming December 7, 1944. Within the week, Curtiz wanted Crawford canned, claiming she was altering the look and interpretation of the character to make her more glamorous. There were the inevitable arguments over those trademark Crawford shoulders, with the star tearfully (and not altogether truthfully) claiming her dowdy off-the-rack Sears dresses were unpadded. Curtiz started referring to her as "Phony Joanie" and "the rotten bitch," laying into her mercilessly in front of cast and crew. Crawford wanted the director fired and replaced "with a human being."
"I had to be the referee," Wald said later. "We had several meetings filled with blood, sweat, and tears. Then everything started to settle down. Mike restricted himself to swearing only in Hungarian, and Joan stopped streamlining the apron strings around her figure and let them hang."
Crawford claimed Curtiz gained respect for her after she stood up to his "post-graduate course in humiliation," and she admitted that once they reached detente, "he started training me."
What, then, of the final product, the award-winning performance we see on the screen? For all its similarities to previous Crawford roles and the resonance with her real-life rise from abject poverty to spectacular success, Mildred Pierce offers the actress more to work with than she had been given in years. The narrative arc of her earlier “shopgirl” pictures usually placed her as a disadvantaged but determined girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose transformation to wealthy, sophisticated woman of the world is achieved rather suddenly and most often through her connection to a man who can give her the high life she longs for. This film devotes much screen time to showing Mildred work hard, make sacrifices, raise her children and tackle the male-dominated business world on her own, with little help, in fact a great deal of hindrance, from the men in her life, next to whom she is seen as smarter, shrewder and more deserving of the good things she earns. (Not that this is a proto-feminist tract; befitting the times, the character is ultimately punished for her ambition and success.) Even her marriage of convenience to a man from a prominent family is not the work of a gold digger – she’s already doing quite well, thank you, at that point – but of a mother seeking greater respectability for her daughter.
And therein lies the character’s fatal flaw, her utter devotion to her manipulative, demanding, unscrupulous child, even to the point of being willing to take the rap for her criminal act. Where audiences a few years before wept for Stanwyck’s grand sacrifice for a sweet, loving daughter in Stella Dallas (1937), here they cheered for the spoiled Veda’s eventual downfall. Credit for this also has to go to 17-year-old Ann Blyth’s committedly vicious performance, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination, as did Eve Arden as Mildred’s wisecracking friend and business associate who tells her, “Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”
But it’s Crawford who carries the picture on those very imposing shoulders (despite Curtiz’s grousing, the pads remained). She was not an actress particularly known for her subtlety; F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that if she were given the stage direction ‘telling a lie,’ she would “practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.” Yet critics were saying she was “very intense and restrained” in the part, playing it “with studied underemphasis” (Howard Barnes, New York Herald Tribune), and with “greater flexibility as an actress” giving “the best performance of her career” (New York Daily News). It must also have been a real boost to be nominated by the New York Film Critics Circle and named Best Actress by the National Board of Review. But it was Hollywood’s top prize that finally brought her a measure of the respect and recognition she craved.
The road to Oscar Night began with a word-of-mouth campaign by producer Jerry Wald. Crawford was skeptical at first, certain that the industry’s general disregard would keep her from even being nominated, much less winning. Despite being included in the five contenders for Best Actress, her confidence was still low enough, and her nerves high enough, to keep her from attending the ceremony. Feigning illness, she listened to the ceremony at home. When her win was announced, the audience broke into “an explosion of applause,” according to Daily Variety. Curtiz accepted on her behalf, telling the crowd at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, “Miss Crawford is very, very ill,” but back home Crawford made a miraculous recovery. With a quick zhuzhing by the hair and make-up artists who just happened to be standing by, she was propped up in bed in a fashionable negligee, ready for the also conveniently present photographers to snap her receiving the award from Curtiz later that night. As gossip columnist Hedda Hopper noted, those shots pushed all the other winners off the front page.
Crawford’s legendary win and startling comeback also obscured somewhat the achievements of the film as a whole. In addition to nominations for Blyth, Arden, Ernest Haller and Ranald MacDougall (who received sole credit for the screenplay), Mildred Pierce was also nominated for Best Picture. Haller’s contribution alone is significant. An Oscar winner (shared with Ray Rennahan) a few years earlier for Gone With the Wind (1939), he and art director Anton Grot worked together to create the stark daylight of Southern California and the expressive night shadows that underscore the characters' darkest motives and desires.
There are other contributions to the picture rarely mentioned but worthy of consideration. One is the expressive use of sound. Notice especially in the police station scenes the way every little noise – the rustle of a newspaper, the buzzing of a telephone, a pencil being sharpened, the echoing voices and footsteps – are isolated and heightened to plunge the barely contained Mildred into paranoia and confusion.
Film scholar David Thomson, in his book “America in the Dark” (William Morrow and Co., 1977), also points out that this is one of the earliest incidences of suburbia taking a prominent place in American film – and not in a positive light. Mildred Pierce depicts the middle-class world of hardworking dads, piano-playing schoolkids, mom and apple pie as treacherous and poisonous in its own way as the suburbia of American Beauty (1999). “In hindsight, it becomes a piece of social criticism, more subtle than Warner’s or director Michael Curtiz recognized, I suspect,” Thomson wrote.
Despite all the talents brought to bear on this production, however, this will always be remembered most as the film in which Crawford reinvented herself, scoring a huge commercial and critical success and launching a new career phase as a tough-as-nails but nobly suffering woman "of a certain age" in cautionary melodramas of greed and possessiveness.
