Mildred Pierce (1945)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.
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What critics compared Mildred Pierce to
Far From Heaven , the TV series Mildred Pierce and now the glorious Carol rekindle the spirit of an age when “women’s pictures” were commonplace in Hollywood, telling female-centred, taboo-breaking stories, featuring exceptional actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whose characters face obstacles – prejudice around race, class, gender – that are no less prevalent today.
But after Far From Heaven and his adaptation of Mildred Pierce for HBO, his experiment in period moviemaking feels less a tribute to directors like Douglas Sirk and more like the cinematic necrophilia of his short Karen Carpenter film.
His first foray into this style, Far From Heaven, was half homage to women’s picture king Douglas Sirk, half postmodern chiding of the genre’s limitations, but after readapting Mildred Pierce into a compulsively watchable miniseries on HBO, Haynes is ready to play it straight.
In 2011’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, he supersized the 1945 Joan Crawford original’s tragic feminism and made his update feel urgent and new.
But other of his works, including the Julianne Moore-starring "Far From Heaven" and the James M. Cain "Mildred Pierce" adaptation for HBO, have a visual look that the technicians of Hollywood's Golden Age might envy.
Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in top form as a pair of women drawn together in spite of the intrusive men around them, “Carol” undeniably marks Haynes’ most contained work, though it also shows the influence of the director’s several period dramas preceding it — including his “Mildred Pierce” miniseries for HBO and, most significantly, his 2002 refashioning of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, “Far From Heaven.”
Before long, she's managed to launch a successful restaurant (as Crawford did in "Mildred Pierce") while protecting her daughter's self-esteem (a la Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas").
Also very present is the spirit of Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce," which lends the story its central predicament.
An ugly turn of events right out of "Mildred Pierce" involving her tough teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo ) turns fortuitous for her, and she winds up a proprietress of a little restaurant whose principal clientele is a 30-person film crew.
Pedro Almod�var is another auteur whose queer eye feasts on eruptions of womanhood, and in Volver, his new work, he name-checks his own cinematic duo (Mildred Pierce arcanely, Visconti's Bellissima explicitly).
The movie is being compared to Mildred Pierce, and it contains a several parallels, one of which involves Raimunda running a restaurant successfully on her own.
Cruz has said it's the role of her career, and she may be right: drawing heavily on the Sophia Loren of yore in stylizing her sumptuous beauty, both Loren in Two Women and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce are Raimunda's indomitable predecessors.
Mills also outfits Plummer in a series of supposedly "elegant" old-queen, Ascot-accessorized ensembles, like Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce, which have a slightly risible retro look to them.
Nor does Carrie enlist our sympathies through the portrayal of maternal self-sacrifice for the benefit of a beloved daughter in the style of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) or Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945).
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Winslet returns to the repressed frustration that won her acclaim in "Mildred Pierce."
After a while, Debra Winger shows up as the sisters' quasi-estranged mother, and she and Hathaway have a fight scene that's as raw as Ingmar Bergman and as operatic as Mildred Pierce.
In recent years, a hint of off-putting harshness has crept into Winslet's work (in Revolutionary Road and Mildred Pierce, she did too much gloomy suffering for our sins), but in Titanic she plays Rose as a spiky princess, trapped by privilege, who allows herself to melt like a girl and, in doing so, melts her own prison and finds herself as a woman.