Many critics bracket the classic film noir period between 1941 and 1959, but the noir label is sometimes used with newer color productions, such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.  In any case, the film noir tradition features hard-boiled stories of crime, violence, betrayal, and passion.  The classic plot involves a strong woman, the man she manipulates, and the murder they conspire to commit, though variations include elaborate robberies that go sour, sexual infidelities discovered, political corruption revealed, and gambling schemes defeated.

            A recurring debate considers whether film noir constitutes a separate genre of film, such as westerns or musicals, or is merely a set of cinematic techniques.  Most critics note a variety of stylistic features first pioneered by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane:  deep-focus, wide-angle photography; low-key, high-contrast lighting; expressionistic refraction and reflection of light through smoke, windows, mirrors, and wet pavement; unusual camera angles; tightly framed shots; voice-over narrative used in flashbacks; and rapidly cut editing between long shots and close-ups.  The effects of these characteristic styles include the viewer’s forced involvement in a scene; a suggestion of mystery and evil lurking in the darkness; an unsettled, random, even schizophrenic world; an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere; and a dominance of the past over the present, of guilt over grace.

            Certainly these cinematic techniques and the effects that film-makers may achieve by using them do not determine film noir’s status as a mere style of production since style may also reinforce aspects of plot, character, and theme.  However, those who argue for film noir as a genre often look beyond recurrent cinematic features to its historical antecedents in German expressionistic film, American hard-boiled fiction, socially critical gangster movies of the 1930s, Italian neorealism, and the angst of returning World War II veterans.  When you look, it is easy to find implicit and explicit references in these films to the loss, insecurity, and cynicism of war.  Many films suggest the rise of women’s personal and financial power through jobs in war industries, while contrasting betrayals and disillusionment suffered by war-torn men returning home to discover unfaithful wives or lovers.  Sometimes, the male hero merely suggests that American avenues of social and personal success are dull, restrictive, and unsatisfying.  As a body of work, film noir seems to present the dark side of the American character as an almost subversive argument against relentlessly optimistic traditional family consumerism promoted, after the war, by advertising and television.

The Film (1945)

             Director Michael Curtiz and composer Max Steiner collaborated again after their success with Casablanca, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1943.  Mildred Pierce earned a Best Actress award for Joan Crawford, who plays the title character, a tough, hard-working, self-sacrificing mother of a thankless, spoiled and wicked daughter, Veda, convincingly portrayed by Ann Blyth in her first substantial dramatic role.  Eve Arden plays Mildred’s worldly wise and man-weary Girl Friday who counts up their profits even as she commiserates with her boss’s uncertain love life.

            Like the hard-boiled stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the original novel  Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain, features a “tough guy hero,” but in this case the guy is a woman.  Reflecting the wartime rise of American women in the industrial workforce, there are hints that Mildred becomes the tough guy because the men she knows—her two husbands and her business partner—are too weak or too self-centered to take on the task.  When her husband is forced out of a failing real estate business, Mildred is angry and frustrated at his incompetence as the breadwinner, so she sets out to prove herself an intelligent, resourceful and successful restaurateur.  However, her professional success is in conflict with her role as mother in her obsessive relationship with her willful daughter, whom she often begs for love (Basinger 177).  In fact, her only poor business decision is made in sacrifice for Veda when Mildred buys Monte Beragon’s social prestige and family name in exchange for a third interest in her restaurant chain.  It is ironic that the idle playboy Monte provides not only a means for Mildred to satisfy Veda’s social ambitions, and renew the mother-daughter relationship, but also a means to finally destroy that relationship when Veda launches an affair with Monte and then, rejected, kills him.

            In terms of the noir visual motifs, the film makes abundant use of low-key lighting, diagonal lines and shadows (especially across Mildred’s face) and night-for-night shots in exterior locations, which all work to emphasize an undercurrent of pessimism, out-of-kilter emotions, and personal alienation.  Moreover, “the introductory shot of Veda, the murderess, is also typical of many noir films because it reveals that reality is not what it seems.  Veda is first seen wearing a white dress and flowers, photographed from a low angle.  The angle gives her a dominating, threatening aspect at odds with the innocent clothing; and the contradictory image adds mystery, ambiguity, and a sense of danger to her character” (Silver and Ward 188).

Finally, the flashback technique in Mildred Pierce is typical of film-noir narrative in emphasizing the fated nature of the protagonist’s life.  All the events and her own decisions that have led to her second husband’s murder and to her own cross-examination by the police have already happened in the past, as she recounts her story.  This story that begins in her apparent unselfish devotion to her children, and that develops as a demonstration of her individual self-determination, sadly ends with the predetermined sense that Mildred is punished for giving too much of herself away to her daughter Veda.  April 2, 1999--Greg Lyons

Basinger, Jeanine.  A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960.  Hannover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1993.

Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds.  Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style.  Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1992.