Mildred Pierce and Women in Film
1978; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2712276
ISSN1080-6490
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumothrilled thousands of fans and assured MGM box office success. But Crawford, frustrated by the predictability of roles offered to her, left Louis B. Mayer's studio early in the forties. For over two years she rejected all screen roles shown to her and then in 1944 read and accepted a part in the script that marked her return to the screen and gave Crawford her only Academy Award. The screenplay was Mildred Pierce, a dark, suspenseful movie based upon a James Cain novel. Crawford fans, ever loyal, flocked to New York's Strand Theater on September 28, 1945, when Mildred Pierce opened, and continued to attend in record numbers. Warner Brothers, the producers of the film, reported a gross of five million dollars.' Mildred Pierce was both a familiar and novel character for Crawford to play. A drab California divorcee with two daughters to support, Mildred seemed similar to Sadie McKee and other Crawford heroines of the thirties. As Mildred, Crawford began the movie in Sears, Roebuck specials and then succeeded to the fashionable Adrian outfits that had become her trademark. She was after all no stranger to roles that required her to begin a movie as poor but beautiful. Both she and her fans knew that the poverty would be overcome precisely because of her beauty. Mildred Pierce, however, departed from the formula in that the poor but lovely woman not only reached the peaks of success but also experienced the depths of failure; in the end, nothing remained but a flicker of hope. It is the tragedies that befell Mildred and the bleak ending that distinguished Mildred Pierce from its innumerable predecessors. It took six screenwriters to make the Cain novel an acceptable screenplay. Though only Ranald MacDougall received screen credit, the other
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