Mildred Pierce Essay

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During the Great Depression, many American housewives had to find a job in order to help their unemployed husbands to make ends meet, putting their family life in peril. And even Mildred Pierce, main character of one of the most memorable classic, Mildred Pierce, cannot escape this difficulty reality. Mildred Pierce is a melodramatic film noir directed by the famed Michael Curtiz, who also directed other classics such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1945). Based on the novel of the same title written by James M. Cain in 1941, Mildred Pierce is about the rise and downfall of a mother of two (Joan Crawford) on both professional and personal level due to her poor choice of men and her ungrateful spoiled daughter, Veda. The aim of this essay will be to show Michael Curtiz’s work on the narrative, editing and mise-en-scene in Mildred Pierce. It is agreed that “a narrative is a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space” (Bordwell and Thompson, 2003, p69). To be able to define the style of the narrative used in Mildred Pierce, we first need to consider the origin of the narrative and the characteristics it includes. We know that the most dominant style in use between the twenties to the early sixties was the classical Hollywood narrative. That is when films started to tell a story with an established beginning, middle and end and using various techniques to put the viewer into the film and reveal the story key points through the plot and story and their durations, characters, space and time. As most of the classical Hollywood films, credits sequences are often used “to initiate the film narration” (Bordwell and Staiger and Thompson, 1985, p.25). Here in Mildred Pierce, the opening credits sequence showing us the Warner Bros logo, who is known for his gangster and melodrama movies, and then the waves washing
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