What Mildred Pierce <\/em>does not <\/em>offer\u2014and did not offer in its day\u2014is any hope that women might be able to both raise children and work outside the home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, Mildred Pierce <\/em>seems singularly designed to squash any such hope. A mash-up of noir and woman\u2019s melodrama, the film effectively wields the former genre to discipline its female protagonist back into the latter, as film scholar Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues. Released two months after World War II\u2019s end, Mildred Pierce<\/em> tapped into social anxieties about the millions of women who had entered the workforce during the war. Would children be damaged by their mothers\u2019 absence? Would men be emasculated by their wives\u2019 newfound financial independence? Would society break down into a nihilism best rendered in the new shades of noir? Yes, yes, and yes, Mildred Pierce <\/em>answered resoundingly, which is why it told a generation of working women to go back home (as did much postwar public policy). Rosie the Riveter could not also be June Cleaver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mildred Pierce <\/em>mercilessly punishes its title character for venturing too far into the workplace, showing the terrible fate such a woman inevitably meets\u2014even someone as glamorous and powerful as Joan Crawford. In typical noir fashion, Mildred Pierce <\/em>has a non-linear narrative. It opens with gunshots and a dead body, after which we meet Mildred, in mink and diamonds, but also in tears; she leans over a pier\u2019s railing, ready to throw herself off. Thus, a catastrophic end is predetermined from the start. Hauled in to Los Angeles\u2019 Hall of Justice under suspicion, Mildred is interrogated by the chief inspector, who demands her story; it is given in three long flashbacks, starting in the register of women\u2019s melodrama but steadily devolving into noir. The viewer does not yet know whether Mildred is our femme fatale murderess, but does know she \u201cwas wrong,\u201d because those are the words she uses to launch her story. The flashbacks show Mildred as a discontented housewife, sick of being stuck in the kitchen, nagging her unemployed husband Bert (Bruce Bennett). After kicking Bert out for a suspected affair, Mildred is compelled to get a job waiting tables, determined to maintain the middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by her daughters, the angelic Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe) and devilish Veda (Blythe). So far, Mildred\u2019s only crime is the era\u2019s dreaded \u201cmomism\u201d\u2014the unhealthy tendency to over-mother and under-wife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Things take a turn, though, when Mildred\u2019s ambitions expand (along with the breadth of her shoulder pads) from part-time waitress to full-time businesswoman. She launches a successful restaurant franchise, which increasingly consumes her time and her femininity. Mildred stiffens, trading in her flower-patterned apron and housedresses for pinstriped power suits. When she was a housewife, Mildred demurely eschewed liquor; as a businesswoman, she drinks whiskey straight, a habit she explicitly describes as male. Along the way, Mildred\u2019s professional success emasculates the men in her path, from Bert to her male financiers: Wally Faye (Jack Carson), who she puts in an apron, and Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), who she keeps as a lover and who will wind up dead, which the viewer knows from that opening scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unsubtly, the film links Mildred\u2019s bid for financial independence with a dangerous sexual looseness and, most importantly, her children\u2019s ruin. While discouraging Wally\u2019s sexual advances, she surrenders to Monte\u2019s, for which she is harshly punished indeed. The scene of Mildred and Monte\u2019s extramarital sexual consummation\u2014rendered in a literal record-skipping ellipsis to pass muster with the Production Code\u2014is followed immediately with the melodramatic sequence of Kay\u2019s death from pneumonia, the early symptoms of which her distracted mother ignored. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If Mildred\u2019s professional ambitions kill <\/em>Kay, they make Veda a killer.<\/em> Mildred fails to learn the correct lesson from Kay\u2019s death: that she should return to full-time mothering and marriage. Instead, she pours herself further into growing her business, funneling funds towards Veda, instead of time and attention. Increasingly \u201cspoiled rotten\u201d and predatory, Veda feels entitled to Mildred\u2019s money and, eventually, to Monte, with whom she conducts an affair that turns deadly. It was Veda who pulled the trigger in that opening scene, the viewer learns, returning to the chief inspector\u2019s office. Mildred did not kill Monte, but she is <\/em>guilty\u2014guilty of sacrificing her children on the altar of (unnaturally unfeminine) professional ambition. The film ends with Mildred leaving the Hall of Justice, leaning on Bert\u2019s arm, which she has learned the hard way<\/em> is her proper place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For all its pleasures, it would be nice to consign Mildred Pierce\u2019s <\/em>gender politics to the ancient past. Unfortunately, and despite the intervening second-wave feminist movement, Hollywood still likes to treat working motherhood as a foregone impossibility. Comedies from Baby Boom <\/em>(1987) to I Don\u2019t Know How She Does It <\/em>(2011) and Bad Moms <\/em>(2015) relish in running working mothers through the ringer for laughs, offering no plausible solutions to their real-life counterparts\u2019 struggles, just as the title I Don\u2019t Know <\/em>promises. Here\u2019s their advice, respectively: Leave your high-powered job for rural Vermont; \u201cjuggle\u201d better; and stop being so uptight. Dramas and horror movies have been even more unkind, still suggesting that working mothers risk rendering their children maladjusted sociopaths. Motherhood as an artist (the most selfish of professions) is especially impossible, according to recent entries like Hereditary <\/em>(2018) <\/em>and Shirley <\/em>(2020). <\/p>\n\n\n\n So maybe Mildred Pierce<\/em> does offer something to today\u2019s working mothers after all: the chance to see clearly\u2014in stark black and white\u2014the denigration and mom-blaming that lingers in our culture, and to reject it. As we begin to imagine our lives and society beyond Covid-19 quarantines,which have especially strained working mothers and pushed them out of the workforce again by the millions, it\u2019s high time we figure out how to make working motherhood less impossible. As more women reach the top of the film industry, maybe the movies can finally help us envision the possibilities. “Mildred Pierce” is currently streaming on HBO Max<\/a>, and is available on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/MP2-1024x768.jpg\")
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