Mildred Pierce

Originally published on Letterboxd on 08/05/23

Think my experience of seeing my first Joan Crawford picture in a theatre- something I was looking forward to immensely- was discoloured by receiving an extremely unfortunate piece of news right as it was about to begin, as well as being informed that the print they were about to run was not, in fact, the nitrate print that the BFI spent a month promoting.

That being said- there’s very little that could derail a melodrama as lovingly woven as this is. The relentlessness of its descent into the inevitable generational affliction becomes all the more impressive when considering just how much tenderness it extracts from each stage in Mildred’s swift construction and even quicker destruction of a self-contained fantasy of meritocracy that is consistently at odds with the monolith of profit. The recent dismissal of Curtiz as a nameless journeyman and a one-hit wonder becomes all the more infuriating when one witnesses the stark, shapeless shadows and intermittent shafts of light that penetrate the modernist beach house that acts as an anchor dragging everything down to the depths, imbuing the affair with a sense of the Southern Gothic that is only heightened by the perversity of the symbiosis between Mildred and her daughter Veda (the latter of whom joins my shot but illustrious list of “onscreen children who should be shoved into an incinerator”)