Introduction: Mildred Pierce, pedagogy and the canon

Abstract

Told for the most part in a deceptive flashback, the Hollywood classic Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) charts the obsessive relationship between the entrepreneurial, divorced working mother Mildred (Joan Crawford) and her spoilt and snobbish daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), which develops into a murderous love triangle after the manipulative playboy Monte1 (Zachary Scott) enters their lives. Although in its heyday it was often dismissed by critics as a ‘woman's film’ and ‘merely’ a star vehicle for Crawford, since the 1970s Mildred Pierce has been a key text in film studies for its centrality to debates about gender, genre and narrative, but also about history, authorship and critical methodology. E. Ann Kaplan's edited collection, Women in Film Noir (figure 1), first published in 1978 and revised and republished several times, contains Pam Cook's influential essay ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’.2 This text has featured on countless course syllabuses and been read by generations of students, notably including Todd Haynes, whose television miniseries Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011) introduced the text to new audiences, as well as bringing back into focus James M. Cain's original novel (1941), to which it bears a closer resemblance than it does to Curtiz's film. Haynes's adaptation occasioned a revival of interest in Mildred Pierce, not only by inviting comparison with the classic Hollywood film, but also by reminding us of the foundational debates that preoccupied film studies during the highly significant phase of its development as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. The film served as a useful case study for teaching genre, lighting codes and mise-en-scene, and stardom. This dossier aims to resuscitate interest in Mildred Pierce, demonstrating that its many pleasures, far from being locked in the past, continue to stimulate academic debate. As well as appraising why the original film was integral to some of the most important phases of film studies, we consider its new connectivity with academia and beyond.