70/100

Watched this nearly back-to-back with Haynes' version (second viewing in both cases; hadn't seen the Curtiz in over 20 years), and could now write an epic piece on the challenges of literary adaptation, as well as a separate epic piece on artificiality vs. naturalism. Strict fidelity to Cain's novel wasn't even remotely an option for 1945 Hollywood, of course, but the choice to reconceive the story as a sort of murder mystery, told in flashback, seems inspired as much by necessary compression as by the dictates of the Hays Code. Like Glazer's Under the Skin, Curtiz's Mildred Pierce is essentially an original work very loosely inspired by its source; useful elements were retained and transformed, while everything else (most…

Film #20 of Project 40

”Personally, I think alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”

For two reasons Mildred Pierce is a historically significant movie: first unlike most of the male dominant movies of the Golden Age of noir its central character is a woman who is fighting to build her own universe in the middle of a masculine world and second it might be one of the earliest movies to employ flashback technique to tell its story. This is a movie where you can witness the genius of Michael Curtiz in every frame, you can see it in the shadows that like ominous beasts chase characters wherever they go, in the almost faultless narrative of the film…

The June / July Classic Crime Project: 1930-1969

I'm a few days late starting this project because sometimes life isn't very accommodating when you want to watch a big load of old noirs through the summer.

I haven't helped myself by recording a load off TCM, Film 4 and Talking Pictures TV and adding them, thus making this a monstrous project which I am highly unlikely to finish. What I do expect, as it progresses, is to rarely come across anything as well written as Mildred Pierce. In fact, something is going to have to be spectacular to beat it.

What is evident in Michael Curtiz's film is that he is completely uninterested in the general course of events that…