Before we have any idea what's going on in Mildred Pierce, we see Mildred herself (Joan Crawford) contemplating suicide by drowning. Just as her hands clench the railing between her and the water into which she intends to plunge, however, a security guard raps the railing with his nightstick and points out that if she jumps in, he will be obliged to jump after her. "Just because you feel like bumpin' yourself off, I gotta get pneumonia," he observes. Then, very significantly, he adds, "Never thought about that, did ya? Okay, think about it."

Viewers who haven't already seen the film at least once are likely to miss the importance of the security guard's implication that Mildred is a selfish woman, too selfish to think about the well being of the people around her. What we will learn about Mildred as we watch the movie, of course, is that she does nothing but think about the people around her. She makes one sacrifice after another for the people that she loves or thinks she loves even though the people around her seem neither to love her nor to give her any reason to think that they love her.

After Mildred and her first husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) decide to separate, her elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) suggests that Mildred should allow herself to be wooed by Wally Fay (Jack Carson), a successful real estate dealer who can offer Mildred and her children a life of ease and comfort. Mildred explains to her daughter that she can't marry Fay because she doesn't love him, and Veda--who is not only astonishingly selfish, but astonishingly believable in her selfishness--replies, "But there are so many things I des . . .--so many things we deserve."

As much as Mildred wants to please her daughter, she refuses, at this point in the film, to enter into a loveless marriage simply for Veda's sake. Instead, she does precisely what most of us are told we're supposed to do in order to provide for our children: She works hard. She takes a job as a waitress and bakes pies in her house and barely sleeps because she wants to provide Veda with everything she desires. But at the same time, she has to hide the fact that she works as a waitress because she doesn't want her daughter to be ashamed of her. And ridiculous though it is, when Veda discovers that her mother is a waitress, she actually has the gall to be ashamed of her. Veda captivates us as a villain because we see her selfishness as a child and the way that Mildred nurtures that selfishness into an insatiable monster. Whereas most soap operatic villains are nasty because soap operas require nastiness, Veda's despicability is something whose origin and development we as an audience can both understand and believe in.

What is perhaps even more important than the believability of Veda to the success of Mildred Pierce is the incredibly tight structure of the film--the myriad ways in which characters replicate one another and come to embody their projections of themselves and one another. Mildred's trouble begins when her husband Bert is driven out of a business partnership with Wally Fay, but it climaxes when she herself is driven out of a business partnership with Fay. Mildred tells us at the beginning of the movie, "I felt as if I'd been born in a kitchen and lived there my whole life--except for the few hours of my wedding," but when she escapes from the kitchen to the larger world, it is only by escaping into the larger world of the restaurant business. Once Mildred realizes that Veda is a good-for-nothing brat, she says, "When she talks to me, it's just to ask for money or poke fun at me in French because I work for a living," but that doesn't stop her from buying Veda expensive presents and footing the bill for her fraternization with the very people who teach her the condescending French phrases. The most glaring structural irony in the film, however, is that after refusing to marry Wally Fay for his fortune (and amassing a fortune of her own instead), Mildred still ends up entering into a loveless marriage in an effort to appease Veda.

After all that hard work, all that success, she ends up far worse off than she would have been if she had married Wally Fay, who has at least demonstrated a head for business and a certain reliability (though not much of a conscience). Instead, because she knows that the lifestyle of playboy Monte Beragon is the lifestyle that her daughter covets, she makes the mistake not only of marrying him against her better judgment, but of signing over a third of her business to him.

Why would she do such a thing? What kind of a woman is Mildred Pierce anyway?

In my opinion, Mildred is precisely the sort of complicated woman that we would do well to give a little more thought to--a woman who sees herself (and is seen by others) as powerful not to the extent that she controls others, but to the extent that she suffers for them. She is quite self-consciously a martyr. When Veda, after having committed the most serious crime in the film, says, "It's your fault I'm this way," Mildred accepts the responsibility--at least in part. And she should. She sees herself as the passive enabler that she has been throughout the film. She doesn't seem to mind Bert's mistress because she rather seems to like the idea of being the wronged wife. After having built Veda into a monster, she appears to do her level best to turn her younger daughter Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe) into the same sort of monster.

And what does she get for all her sacrifices? It's not being cheated out of her business or estranged from the daughter whose love she has sought that matters nearly so much as the fact that the two people who die in the film die with her name on their lips. Young Kay dies calling for her mother. And when Monty Beragon is shot, he says only one thing: "Mildred."

Martyrs are different from other people in that they measure their success in terms of sacrifice--in terms of the things (sleep, pleasure, money) that they deny themselves. So when Monty Beragon tells Mildred Pierce that as we get older, the only things we regret "are the things we didn't do," he is using an entirely inappropriate line of reasoning. The film gradually makes clear to us that Mildred is controlled by her fears rather than her desires, that she is the kind of person who is far more likely to regret the things she did than those she didn't. And what makes the film that bears her name so intriguing is that it actually sides with her.

After committing one of the most deserved murders in cinematic history, Veda discovers that sometimes the things we regret are the things that we do, the actions that cannot be reversed. And though Mildred, in true martyr fashion, attempts to take the rap for her daughter, she is in the hands of a policeman who refuses to punish a woman who is not guilty because he too believes that it is just as possible to regret what we do as what we fail to do. He even says so. The final line of the movie, in fact, is delivered by Inspector Peterson (Moroni Olsen): "There are times when I regret being a policeman."

The inspector regrets what he is, not what he isn't--just as Veda is learning to regret what she did, not what she didn't do. As for Mildred, she seems likely to regain control of her restaurant chain. Maybe she'll marry Fay this time around [1]. Maybe she'll go back to Bert. Maybe she'll even end up with her very saucy administrator Ida Corwin (Eve Arden). But something tells us that whatever she does, she will figure out how to reduce herself to abject misery by making the people around her dependent upon her in every way. She needs parasites just as desperately as any parasite ever needed a host, which turns out not to be such a shabby insight into the human psyche for a soap opera.


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1) Some students of the film might say that yet another reconciliation between Mildred and Fay seems unlikely in light of her attempt to frame him for Beragon's murder. I would point out, however, that Fay has openly portrayed himself as utterly fixated on Mildred throughout the film. Moreover, he at least claims to be fond of letting bygones be bygones, as when he advises Mildred to merely shrug off the fact that he intends to force her out of her position as head of her own company. Another point that some readers might make about Fay is that Mildred's cold and calculated attempt to frame him seems inconsistent with her tendency to martyr herself. Why doesn't she confess to the crime herself from the outset instead of waiting until the police have determined Fay's innocence? Lots of answers are possible, but I think one is best. It's possible that with Beragon dead and Fay in jail she'll regain undisputed control of the restaurant, but we don't even know that Beragon had a chance to draw up a will, so it seems safe to assume that she'll be getting his share of the restaurant back (as the wife of the deceased). No, I think she acts (as has been her habit throughout the film) more on Veda's behalf than her own. Knowing, as she does, of the sexual component of Veda's relationship with Beragon, she may suspect (and perhaps rightly, one never knows) that if Fay is left at large while Mildred herself is in jail, he will end up preying on little Veda.

Recommended: Yes