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#89 - Mildred Pierce
Michael Curtiz, 1945
A divorced woman has to try to make ends meet so as to provide for her family but also has to contend with the pressures of running a business and handling her suitors.
Occupying a strange grey area between noir and melodrama, Mildred Pierce is nonetheless a good film. Joan Crawford delivers an award-winning performance as the incredibly driven title character, whose goal of achieving a stable home life makes for an incredible case of dramatic irony as her workaholic tendencies only serve to alienate her from her daughter and her suitors both past and present. Other performers are solid, but Crawford towers over all of them. The plot is a surprisingly non-violent noir narrative (barring the cold open that ends in murder) but it's mixed with enough familial tension to blur the line between noir and melodrama. It's full of enough twists and turns but (perhaps more importantly) the gaps between plot developments are packed out well enough. Master journeyman Curtiz makes sure the whole film is paced well and shot with monochromatic flair.
Michael Curtiz, 1945
A divorced woman has to try to make ends meet so as to provide for her family but also has to contend with the pressures of running a business and handling her suitors.
Occupying a strange grey area between noir and melodrama, Mildred Pierce is nonetheless a good film. Joan Crawford delivers an award-winning performance as the incredibly driven title character, whose goal of achieving a stable home life makes for an incredible case of dramatic irony as her workaholic tendencies only serve to alienate her from her daughter and her suitors both past and present. Other performers are solid, but Crawford towers over all of them. The plot is a surprisingly non-violent noir narrative (barring the cold open that ends in murder) but it's mixed with enough familial tension to blur the line between noir and melodrama. It's full of enough twists and turns but (perhaps more importantly) the gaps between plot developments are packed out well enough. Master journeyman Curtiz makes sure the whole film is paced well and shot with monochromatic flair.