No wonder Crawford exerts such command over audiences young and old, gay and straight. Whether in her kitchen pinny, or fox stole, or two-piece swimsuit, Crawford is an electrifying diva presence, and her handsome face is a formal, trembling mask of passion. She slaps Veda's face, and is finally, definitively slapped in return: domestic warfare which has a greater resonance in the light of the Mommie Dearest revelations.

She is consumed with pride, and social shame, and passionate love for a daughter incapable of returning it. From there she builds her own restaurant chain and remarries into high society. This new Mildred Pierce, produced for HBO with an apparently unlimited budget, may well be the most faithful adaptation of a book ever made: the dialogue is nearly verbatim, and the film. Crawford and others are called in to the station house to explain and the twists and turns of the plot are disclosed in flashback, a structural device which, far from lessening its impact, deepens the story and amplifies its surprises and ambushes.Ĭrawford is the hardworking deserted wife who, to support her haughty young princess of a daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), takes a demeaning job as a waitress. The book really confronts a lot of issues about human strengths and weaknesses, about the attraction to upper class mentality, how it sucks people into a world that is very shallow and egocentric, while the working class which Mildred comes from are the people that rally and help her and support her. HBO’s Mildred Pierce works best as a feminist soap opera the story of an abandoned woman who sacrifices her pride and everything else for her child, and is checkmated by the object of all. Crawford is Mildred, whose name is enigmatically on the lips of her second husband as he is shot dead in his beach-house by an unseen murderer.

F or its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Joan Crawford, Michael Curtiz's noir thriller is utterly gripping.

Mildred pierce book review