860 Mildred Pierce

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PfR73
Joined: Sun Mar 27, 2005 6:07 pm

Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#26 Post by PfR73 » Mon May 01, 2017 2:03 pm

rohmerin wrote:Aldrich, how is it possible that a Rockefeller's cousin had got financial troubles for making his films? Strange.
From an article by David Thomson

"He was a cousin to Nelson Rockefeller and was within sight of an enormous amount of money, including the Chase Bank. No American film director was born as wealthy as Aldrich—and then so thoroughly cut off from family money...Family connections offered a comfortable career in banking. But when he married Harriet Foster (also from a wealthy family), Aldrich decided to honeymoon in Los Angeles because, at college, he was booking bands for the school dances and had fallen in love with show business. So he dropped out of college and took a $50-a-week job as a clerk at RKO...He was happy, but word came back from Rhode Island that if he persisted with this nonsense he would be cut off from the family. He took the risk and set out on his own. And he was never forgiven."

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rohmerin
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 10:36 am
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Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#27 Post by rohmerin » Sat Jul 29, 2017 7:15 pm

My 5th vision of the film. How much I love this picture! and I didn't remember how deeply Catholic is indeed and with a touch of Marxist ideology because be snob or from "proud old familes" are bad vs the good money made with effort or the honesty of cleaning ladies at the end. I've checked at wikipedia if the script writer had troubles with Mac Carthy, but he did not.
Both versions are excellent with the different endings. The book is very good too.

I don't think you foreigners have noticed that when you say Veda, it sounds the same as Vida in Spanish, and that means Life, what Veda is for Mildred.

All those B male actors are terrific in the film. And thank WB did not cast Ronald Reagan, although he was more good looking than Jack Carson. A actor will be in the war. How beautiful Tyrone Power could have been if Fox and war would have let him to play Monte.

I don't get the Glendale problem. Is it as bad as it was for Veda in the novel / film even today?
Is Pasadena all full with Old money today?

I love James M Cain's world. I re-watched Slightly Scarlet and it's good spite the bad not well known actors, specially Ronda Fleming who is a disaster, and the 50s colors and looks more close to Douglas Sirk than a film noir. Very distracting. Miss Dahl steals all the film. I haven't read the book because it's OOP in Spanish-language. Mierda, and I don't read fiction in English (yes in Italian or French).

What I did read was Serenade, a wonderful noir sordid trip to Mexico and straight- sexuality after a rape of a whore in a Church. Loved all. The WB movie is so bad! And so long and boring! Spite my country woman Sara Montiel who appears at the top of her beauty when she married Anthony Mann.

Both novels deserved a better adaptation, but Noir has never been successful at B.O. Fuck !

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
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Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#28 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:19 am

It might be pushing it too far, but I was struck on watching the film this time through that this could be seen as a good companion piece to Citizen Kane, maybe even the female led take on a similar structured journey! We see the title character capitalise on their opportunities and set up a successful business, only to have that success impact on their private lives as their love affairs collapse around them, seen mostly through flashback.

It even makes the dying man’s final word in the opening murder, returned to at the end of the film (and becoming inexplicable in its eventual context), make sense, as his croaked out “Mildred!” is this film’s equivalent of “Rosebud”!

The main differences are in scale (the newspaper empire versus a successful restaurant chain) and the distanced, unemotional nature of the investigation into Kane’s empire (the reporter’s investigation in Kane being comparable more perhaps to the insurance investigator in The Killers!) compared to the more crime of passion noir murder-mystery structure in Mildred Pierce. There is also the way that in Citizen Kane the actions of the absent title character are being explained by all of the supporting cast of his life, in the process of mythologising and/or demonising this larger than life character, which provides some insight but (ironically for a newspaper magnate) filtered through a fragmentary secondhand, potentially biased perspective. Whilst in Mildred Pierce, after a couple of supporting characters are interviewed by the police in connection with the murdered man in the beachhouse, the bulk of the narrative involves Mildred’s flashback as she unburdens herself of her life story to the investigators. Albeit keeping a couple of key points to herself at the very end! But unlike Kane, she will not be allowed to keep them a secret for long!

In some ways the interrogation and the film itself is a chance for Mildred to finally tell her own story and have people listen to her, after having been betrayed by lovers with wandering eyes and daughters with expensive tastes. Maybe that’s what makes this a more emotional 'women’s picture' than a man’s? Kane never gets to manufacture his own life story, and takes his secrets of his interior life to the grave. Kane is more of a collector of artefacts and builder of ostentatious Xanadus to compensate for his lack of love, whilst Mildred’s empire really is in the end all about providing for her daughter (even eventually the lover!), and when the ungrateful child for whom all of this was done has been banished Mildred herself has no particular drive to continue amassing wealth and property, or even to carry on running her business any more (as rohmerin says above, "Veda" really is Mildred's entire life, maybe fatefully made more so by being the only surviving daughter). And Mildred’s greatest catharsis comes from finally having the yoke of burden that her daughter represents legitimised and removed by the authorities rather than having to cut the ties that bind herself.

Arguably a slight flaw of the end of Mildred Pierce are perhaps the final moments, which sees Mildred in back in the arms of the first husband again as they leave the police station (and incarcerated daughter!) into the morning sunlight. Yet that was the husband who was stifling Mildred with domesticity in the early scenes and not too supportive of her business ambitions and making her own money for the toll it was taking on the housework, so is it entirely happy that Mildred has ended up back with this dull lunk? Even if he’s not going to dip his hand into the till or seduce the daughter like the others what does he have to offer Mildred, aside from just being proven right about the daughter’s gold-digging ways? (Are we meant to believe that he knew that Mildred's ambition was purely about her daughter, and not to have any success or autonomy of her own, and the implication of the ending is that now the daughter has gone and Mildred has gotten her ambition out of her system that she will be fine going back to 'just being a normal housewife'? Is that the happy ending? Of being free of drives and having made peace with the home abandoned at the beginning?) Either way, I think that I would have much preferred to see Mildred kick him to the kerb as well and go off with the more than capable business partner Kay! (Kay of course being the most able character in the film, with all of the correct assessments of other characters as well as the best lines! Kind of the equivalent to the Joseph Cotten character from Kane!)

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FrauBlucher
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Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#29 Post by FrauBlucher » Sun May 10, 2020 12:06 pm

As a Mother's Day connection, TCM cleverly programmed Mildred Pierce on Noir Alley. Eddie Muller's intros and outros were brilliant as usual. In the intro one nugget was that Stanwyck wanted the Mildred role very badly. Producer Jerry Wald ended up giving to Crawford. Crawford was indeed great but if there was one other actress I could see in that role it would've been Stanwyck

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swo17
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Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#30 Post by swo17 » Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:50 pm


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yoloswegmaster
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Re: 860 Mildred Pierce

#31 Post by yoloswegmaster » Thu Mar 09, 2023 7:51 am


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