The complex film Mildred Pierce (1945) commented on the appropriate roles for women in the post-war era. As one of the top-grossing films of the 1940s, Mildred Pierce provided a dark composite view of post-war suburban America and suggested that...

Mildred Pierce is a novel (1941) by James M. Cain. It was made into a feature film starring Joan...

Thanks to the auteur theory, instead of a lot of antiquated factory product and the studio P. and L. of yesteryear, we have the greats-Ford, Hawks, Lubitsch, Sturges, Cukor, Wyler, Lang, Wilder, Fuller, Hitchcock (and this is just a quick Monday-morning skim off the top...

When Louis B. Mayer saw Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, he exploded, “How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?” (Wilder, who was present, replied, “I am Wilder and go fuck yourself.”) As Joan Crawford in the much-ridiculed Mommie Dearest, Faye Dunaway...

When Louis B. Mayer saw Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, he exploded, “How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?” (Wilder, who was present, replied, “I am Wilder and go fuck yourself.”) As Joan Crawford in the much-ridiculed Mommie Dearest, Faye...

Here I am again, reluctantly counting my losses. Beloved, hated or just plain “Who cares?”, more celebrated people died in 2007 than any year in my memory. I always forget somebody, but here is the nucleus of the ones who will light up the headlines...

James M. Cain's novel, Mildred Pierce, wantonly squanders what could have been a very good and representative American story; it could even have been a great one. (p. 79) One of the striking and promising features in the early portions of this novel is that the two main characters are presented with reference to objects and to conventional conceptions. They possess little of the individuality of many merely literary characters. The style of the book is objective, even a little flat in places; it reco...

["Mildred Pierce"] has about three books worth of plot: financial ups and downs, everyone in bed with everyone else, six punchy trick endings one after another. Yet it has many good things. Cain makes no pretensions whatsoever to being a social novelist, but the scenes of Mildred looking for a job, Mildred waiting on table, and Mildred talking to the rich mother of the boy who got Veda into [James T.] Farrell's favorite condition, are bitter, incisive and unquestionably authentic. Cain&...