Saw Mildred Pierce, a noir film that opens on a murder and then flashes back to tell the story of how we got here. Mostly, the film is a fairly progressive film about Mildred, a working mother building a life for her children. The film was shot in the war years, and the business that the mother builds up is a restaurant, but it's still a nice thing to see this woman make a successful career for herself. Alas, she is forced into ever-more financial risk by her heinous daughter Veda. Veda is the wanna-be aristocrat who has the misfortune of being born to a prole and whose disdain for her mother's work is the engine of most of the film. Hilariously, she was almost played by Shirley Temple.
The film was alright. There's a strong proto-feminist (perhaps even crypto-saphic!) undercurrent to the film which makes it feel fresher than other contemporaneous films. The character of Mildred is studied closely. It's an interesting meditation on who this character is, how she's driven to greatness, and what that greatness means to her. It unfortunately also involves Butterfly McQueen (famous for not knowing about birthin' babies in Gone With the Wind) doing her maid role which is the stuff of racial caricature. So this film delivers on strong women, but only strong white women (a trait shared by Gone With the Wind.) We can't have everything.
Joan Crawford does a nice job of portraying Mildred. She does her signature clench-jawed declaiming of her lines and every one sounds great, but she feels strangely wimpy here. I found myself thinking how she could have done it better, such is my vice. Similarly, the other characters are stuck in the mannered style of 40s acting: they say their lines in a service-like way, then scuttle off, leaving the stage clear for the next scene. It's a very formal way of acting. Everyone is playing their role in a way that makes sure the background characters never protrude into the foreground, but it leaves some lines feeling strangely flat, like they're just lines being recited.
Anyway, this was an alright film. Worth seeing for Crawford's scene-chewing and surprisingly progressive in parts.
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