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Mildred Pierce (1945) was a good movie but I couldn't understand how a struggling woman whose husband left could have a maid.
I'm afraid I don't share your opinion. One night some years ago, my dad and I decided to rent some movies and have a movie marathon night. The first was Mildred Pierce, which he remembered fondly from his childhood. I thought it was depressing as all get-out, and he didn't much care for it either. The second was Twenty Bucks, which was absolute filth. We both really enjoyed our third choice, Three Daring Daughters.
Mildred Pierce (1945) was a good movie but I couldn't understand how a struggling woman whose husband left could have a maid.
IIRC, at first, Lottie (Butterfly McQueen) helped Pierce bake pies for the restaurant she waitressed at once the demand increased. The two may have split the profits. Pierce didn't hire Lottie as a maid until her own restaurant business was up and running. She wasn't "struggling" by that time. Lottie also worked at the restaurant.
I always enjoy stories with humble protagonists who make good against the odds, and fish-out-of-water tales. I also enjoy watching Eve Arden. So often she had the best lines and executed them flawlessly!
Last edited by Parnassia; 07-18-2022 at 02:17 PM..
Central to the movie, is that Veda is a monster of Mildred's own creation. Veda amplifies Mildred's own ambitions, insecurities, and obsessions. Veda's words are what lurks within Mildred's own subconscious mind. "...because you'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing." Mildred thought that, about herself, long before Veda thought it about her.
Veda and Monte are presented as utterly contemptible people. So, their opinions and values are also presented as wrong. The audience identifies with Mildred. Plucky, independent women, had been a favorite among audiences, since the days of silent movies. Such women embodied the reality of American farm women, and of the Pioneer women before them.
But Mildred Pierce came at the end of World War II, just as soldiers were returning home. It was a movie with an agenda.
I remember an ad for the film, in which a young soldier is exclaiming, "Oh, boy! Home, and Mildred Pierce!" This didn't just establish the movie as being appropriate for men to see, or just suggest to young women that their returning beaus could be dragged to see Mildred Pierce, once they'd returned. It also, very carefully, advanced the movie as being something that young men and women should see. It was an indoctrination flick - psychological warfare - although only Church, civic, and business leaders understood it as such.
Beginning with Prohibition, a shift in power, away from the nation's Founding Stock, meant a shift in values - away from North Atlantic individualism and independent women, toward the values of those who'd been the vectors of Sexual Pessimism. The new leaders used the end of the war, and the return of men from the battlefields, as an excuse to impose THEIR ideas about how things ought to be.
Rosie the Riveter, needed to be sent back to the kitchen.
Mildred Pierce, ever-so-cunningly, showed American Womanhood, that while being heroic and independent were once necessary and noble, it was now time to let the man be the breadwinner and the leader.
So, in the final scene, we see a financially-ruined Mildred, reunited with her now-employed first husband, walk beneath a building's noble arch, toward a dawning day (while a single church bell sounds, informing us all, that finally, they were on the right path).
I think this stems from the outdated idea that in affluent families, women did not work outside the home -- and especially not in pink collar fields. In fact, in reading the literature of the 19th and early 20th century, it was even considered to be a matter for snobbery if a man was anything but a "gentleman farmer" and "God forbid" he should actually be "in trade". The Jane Austen novels are full of such ideas. Elizabeth Bennett's uncle was scorned by the Bingleys because he was a lawyer.
Btw, there is an excellent HBO "Mildred Pierce" miniseries starring Kate Winslet that makes the class snobbery much more clear. I high recommend it for those who haven't seen it.
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