James M. Cain's depression era novel is made into film noir with the addition of a murder. This prompts a long flashback about a waitress who builds a chain of restaurants, but loses everything else. Mildred was the role of Joan Crawford's life. She surely identified with a woman born into poverty who works to gain wealth but alienates her children through dogmatic parenting.
It's a powerful film with strong studio virtues. Much of the dramatic thrust is provided by Max Steiner's orchestral score. The gorgeous high contrast black and white photography gleams like wet tarmac. The sassy screenplay is joy.
Mildred Pierce isn't as much of an urban film as other forties noirs. It is mostly set in the suburbs of LA, but it still makes good atmospheric use of its environment, the beach towns and highways of Southern California, and features a typically noirish, lavish Malibu beach house where the murder takes place.
Its greatest strength is the depiction of psychological frailty. It is an opera of passive-aggression, an epic of bartered love, of desire and greed rendered so frighteningly sordid that they both mean the same thing. The casting is glorious, particularly Crawford and Ann Blyth who was seventeen when she made this but is scarily believable as Mildred's spoiled, sociopathic daughter.