Directed by: Michael Curtis
Starring: Joan Crawford | Ann Blythe | Zachary Scott | Eve Arden | Bruce Bennett | Jack Carson
Rating: FIVE out of FIVE silk glove slaps
“I felt as if I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life.”
The first thing we see in Mildred Pierce (1945) is murder. A gunshot. A body. And Joan Crawford, the titular housewife, slipping out into the night in a fur coat that’s doing the most. It’s late, of course. That magic hour when respectable people are asleep, and the rest are either drinking, cheating, or deeply regretting the night’s decisions.
The scene? A beach house. Not a beach shack. Not a cozy cottage. A sleek, modernist temple dripping with post-Depression ego. There’s clean lines, angles, and big glass windows. The kind of place you buy when you think you’ve made it. It’s aspirational architecture, dressed to kill, literally.
If you’ve read the James M. Cain novel, or caught Todd Haynes’ 2011 miniseries, you’ll know that the murder isn’t part of the original plot. It was grafted in for the Hays Code, the moral watchdog of the era. Back then, no misdeed could go unpunished. Every sinner had to pay. So the film added a body, and in doing so, turned a domestic tragedy into a full-blown noir. Is it predictable? Absolutely. But so is a martini at a gay bar, and that still gets the job done.
The beach house belongs to Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), a slippery trust-fund daddy with the energy of someone who’s never had to answer his own phone calls. He’s generationally entitled, but spiritually unemployed. He says things like “I’m a Beragon… of the Pasadena Beragons,” as if that means something outside of a country club or a coke-fueled divorce brunch. His family once owned orange groves, now all he’s squeezing is the last drops of relevance. Monte clings to his surname as if it were a life raft, and for Mildred, and later her venomous prodigy, Veda (Ann Blyth), it kind of is. His name opens doors. Mostly to disaster.
You see, the poor bastard bleeding out in the beach house? Why it’s Monte Beragon. A gunshot to the chest, a look of surprise, as if a lifetime of loafing couldn’t possibly end in consequence. His death scene is perfect. One hand on his chest, one foot in irrelevance, and a final gasp of “Mildred,” from his well-tailored body as if he’s dying from drama, not bullets. And just like that, we’re off, pulled into a fog of flashbacks, peeling back every bad decision that led to the inevitable mess left to die on the living room tile.
At first, all signs point to Mildred as the dame in distress. We see her fleeing the scene, and now her ex-husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett), seems all too ready to take the rap. Chivalry or guilt, it’s hard to say at first. But as the flashbacks unspool, the story starts to shift. Motives multiply. Alibis have cracks in them. And it turns out someone else may have pulled the trigger. Someone colder, crueler, and far more calculated.
Looking back, it’s clear the film industry didn’t just reflect society, it shaped it. It gave it a facelift, a cigarette, and told it to lie while the patriarchy still worked. And film noir? It held up a cracked mirror and said, “Smile, sweetheart.” These films weren’t just stylish, they were soaked in something real. Anxiety, power plays, and the quiet dread realizing your dream home comes with termites and a cheating spouse. Noir didn’t glamorize this era, it exposed it. All the post-war jitters, the gender roles buckling under pressure, and the slow, desperate unraveling behind the gleaming teeth of success.
And Joan Crawford chose to do Mildred Pierce because, like the titular character, she had something to prove. By the early 1940s, Crawford’s career was on the skids. MGM had let her go. She was labeled “box office poison.” Hollywood had decided she was too old, too much, too yesterday. Sound familiar? A woman past thirty with ambition? Unforgivable.
So what did Joan do? She didn’t slink offstage. She marched over to Warner Bros. in a tailored suit, made her case to Jack Warner, and clawed her way into Mildred Pierce. Literally. She had to test for the role, a humiliating step-down for a former A-lister. But Crawford was no stranger to playing the long game. Just like Mildred, she rolled up her sleeves and went to work.
And the parallels are all over the place. Mildred waits tables to buy her daughter custom dresses and piano lessons. Joan swallowed her pride to buy a second act. It’s not just personal grit, it’s the post-war American dream with lipstick smeared across the mouth. You work hard, you sacrifice, you build something from nothing… and still get told you’re not enough. That your value expires once you’re no longer shiny, young, or obedient. Mildred wants a better life for her daughter. Joan wants to prove she’s still got it. Both are chasing that shimmering promise of success, the one they don’t tell you comes with a return policy and emotional interest rates.
Both stories, Joan and Mildred’s, are built on sacrifice. But Mildred Pierce doesn’t just admire that struggle. It interrogates it. What happens when you give everything, and the thing you built starts to hate you for it? The film makes a wise choice to wade into the mess of post-war society. And the lens it all gets filtered through? Veda. Mildred’s daughter. She isn’t just a brat, she’s the embodiment of the era’s worst fears. Entitlement, moral decay, the fallout of ambition. If the American Dream had a spoiled, sneering face, it’d be hers. She’s not the villain. She’s the punchline.
Men were off at war, or dealing with the fallout. Shell-shocked, jobless, or just plain checked out. In the meantime, women got resourceful. They worked, raised kids, kept the lights on. And they got damn good at it. Mildred Pierce never mentions the war outright, but it’s everywhere, humming beneath the surface. In the flashbacks, we see Bert lose his job and bow out the second things get tough. He doesn’t fight for his family. He just disappears. That’s the context. Men leaving, women picking up the pieces. Mildred doesn’t just survive, she builds an empire, and she does it all for her children.
Is it embarrassing that Mildred has to sling lunch specials and memorize diner slang just to buy custom dresses for her spoiled brat of a daughter? Maybe. But only to Veda. And even then, she treats those hand-sewn gowns like clearance rack knockoffs compared to the ones she’s circled in Vogue with a ballpoint pen and a sneer. Still, Mildred keeps hustling, backed by her quick-talking coworker Ida (Eve Arden), who is so gloriously coded as a lesbian you half expect her to light a cigarette and ask where the dames are. And that moment Ida lets out a bark at Wally Fay like he’s a chew toy in a suit? Case closed.
And, who’s Wally Fay (Jack Carson)? Just Bert’s old business partner and a walking hard-on in a double-breasted suit. He’s driven by two things, lust and leverage, both of which he aims at Mildred the second he learns that she’s single. He comes onto her like a Tex Avery wolf. Eyes bugging, tongue wagging, practically howling at the moon. All that’s missing is a cartoon boi-oi-oing. But Mildred’s no fool. She sees the hunger in his eyes and flips it into opportunity. She plays him just enough to get what she needs. His connections, his business know-how, his eagerness to impress. And with that, she builds her own empire, one chicken plate at a time. Before long, her name’s stamped on restaurants all over Southern California.
And what does all this do to poor Veda? Well, poor is the last thing she ever wants to be. She grows up without a real father figure, and whatever scrap of respect she might’ve had for her mother gets torched the minute Mildred starts working. Veda doesn’t admire hard work, she loathes it. She wants old money, generational ease, the kind of entitlement Monte Beragon wears like cologne. Mildred, blinded by guilt, marries Monte. Not out of romance, but out of strategy. She thinks the Beragon name might buy her daughter’s affection. It doesn’t. Because Veda doesn’t want a mother who earns her place, she wants a life where nothing has to be earned.
The film doesn’t spell it out, but it doesn’t have to. There’s a long-simmering affair between Veda and Monte brewing behind Mildred’s back, and by the time she walks in on them, caught in a moment that’s more animal than romantic, it’s too late. Mildred flees the beach house in shock. Veda stays behind and brings years of resentment to their final, violent conclusion. Two shots miss, shattering glass instead of ego. The other four find their mark.
After the murder, Mildred spirals. She tries to end her own life by jumping into the ocean. It’s a dramatically quiet moment that is interrupted by a passing cop. By sheer chance, she runs into Wally Fay and lures him back to the house, locking him inside like bait in a trap. The police show up, drag Wally in for questioning, but let him go once they realize he’s just another patsy.
That’s when Bert steps forward, claiming responsibility for the murder. Noble, stupid, or both. But the police aren’t buying it. They press Mildred. Hard. And eventually, she cracks. She tells them the truth. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Bert. It was Veda. Her daughter. The one she sacrificed everything for. The one who pulled the trigger. It lands like a slap. It’s sharp. It’s brutal. It’s iconic. A reveal on par with Darth Vader telling Luke, “By the way, I raw-dogged your mom.”
The film ends with Mildred and Bert walking out of the precinct, their shadows stretching long, their silhouettes folding back into one. Maybe they’ll try again. Maybe they won’t. Hard to say. The damage is deep, but so is the history. The result is less a happy ending and more a quiet resignation. A woman who clawed her way to the top, only to watch it all collapse under the weight of a last name. A man who left, but came back when it mattered. Two people, broken in different ways, stepping into the unknown together, because sometimes, that’s the best you get.
Mildred Pierce was a hit. A big one. It raked in $3.5 million at the box office, which today translates to around $60 million. Critics were generous to Crawford, hailing it as her comeback tour, but they still found room to throw shade. Some questioned how a woman could build an empire from scratch but couldn’t manage a single spoiled teenager. Valid. And yet, Joan walked away with an Oscar for Best Actress, proving once and for all that revenge is best served hot.
After Mildred Pierce, Crawford’s career got the defibrillator treatment. And it worked. She went from “box office poison” to “box office problem solved.” Suddenly, the same studio heads who wouldn’t return her calls were crawling back, pretending they hadn’t just iced her out a few years earlier. She followed up with a string of high-drama, high-glam roles. Think Possessed (1947) and Sudden Fear (1952), both of which landed her more Oscar nominations. She leaned hard into what worked; strong, damaged women with great outfits and even better slaps. Characters who looked like they’d ruin your life and then charge you for the privilege.
But by the mid-1950s, the cracks started showing again. The studio system was crumbling, tastes were changing, and Hollywood were once again tossing out aging actresses. Joan, never one to go quietly, pivoted into campy gothic horror with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). That film reignited her career again, only this time with wigs, wheelchairs, and passive-aggressive murder attempts.
She spent the ‘60s doing the occasional shock-horror role, popping up on TV, and cementing her image as a legend. Equal parts diva, survivor, and cautionary tale. Her final film was Trog (1970), where she played a scientist who adopts a caveman. Yeah.
But by that point, it didn’t matter. Joan Crawford was the brand. The brows. The shoulder pads. The woman who refused to stay down, who turned comebacks into an art form, even if the roles got weirder and the lighting got cruel.
She didn’t go out quietly. She went out Joan.
