William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
James M. Cain's
Mildred Pierce (1941)
Updated 12/6/09
Note: At present, this site focuses only on the hard-boiled school, but it will expand.
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), by James M. Cain
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Double Indemnity (1940) by James M. Cain
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
Mildred Pierce (1941) by James M. Cain
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Since the early thirties Cain had wanted to write about “the great American institution that never gets mentioned on the Fourth of July, a grass widow with two small children to support.” (Hoopes 1982: 305). But Hollywood called, and he traveled, and then he stopped to write The Embezzler for Knopf, which appeared in Liberty (1940) as “Money and the Woman.” There was also an operation for gallstones before Cain could return to the “grass widow.” She may be modeled on Cain’s grandmother but is more likely to be a version of Kate Cunningham, whom Cain was seeing regularly. (Hoopes 1982: 305). Despite Kate’s help, Cain found it difficult to write in the third person, or “straight” as he termed it. He finally finished Mildred Pierce, his longest work, in 1941.
Not a crime novel per se, Mildred Pierce is the most realistic of Cain’s major works, with a complex plot and flashes of brilliance. It follows the lives of Bert and Mildred Pierce through the Depression in Glendale, California, relentlessly examining without relent their lives, their taste, their work, and their children. It does so through a lens worthy of Thorstein Veblen, but one that admires self-sacrifice and cooperation. The narrative opens with the leggy Mildred throwing her vain, unemployed husband, Burt, one of the builders of the subdivision she lives in, out of his own house:
She had little to say about love, fidelity, or morals. She talked about money, and his failure to find work; and when she mentioned the lady of his choice, it was not as a siren who had stolen his love, but as the cause of the shiftlessness that had lately come over him. (Cain 1941: 7)
The emasculation felt by jobless men in the Depression is depicted elsewhere in the era’s literature; what is new in this novel is the grudging admiration that Cain yields up for Mildred as she takes a series of menial jobs, from baking cakes and pies to waiting tables, to make ends meet for her daughters Ray and Veda. She embodies many qualities of Cora from Postman. Employing an intuitive genius about cooking and kitchens, not to mention restaurants (which Cain researched thoroughly), and leveraging a few financial breaks and favors, Mildred finally opens her own restaurant.
Just as she does so, she meets Monty Beragon, a suave Pasadena polo player whose family owns stock in a bank, citrus groves, and packing houses. They spend a weekend at Lake Arrowhead, during which Mildred’s daughter Ray falls ill unbeknownst to her, and on Mildred’s return dies of an elevated fever. Grief-stricken, Mildred decides to succeed for her other child, the haughty, superficial Veda, who idolizes “society.
The precociously sexual Veda flirts with Monty, on whose recommendation Mildred pays for Veda’s countless social frills and expensive music lessons. Then Monty’s family fortune evaporates, as the funds of the bank it owns are seized to pay account holders. Mildred’s initial “loans” to Monty for his polo expenses soon become an entitlement, but her business acumen makes her restaurant and pie business successful. Soon, however, she sees that “Monty, alas, was like Bert, an amateur cynic, and cynics are too cynical to dream.” (Cain 1941: 167-68). The more Mildred condescends to him, the more Monty comes to regard himself as a gigolo, and their their only their lingua franca becomes “wanton … [. . .] shamefully exciting” sexual intercourse (Cain 1941: 171).
With the end of Prohibition in sight, Mildred adds a bar to her operations, but the expense denies Veda her Christmas present, a new grand piano. They fight and, shortly afterward, Mildred braves a historic 1933 rainstorm to seek solace with Monty in his Pasadena mansion, but they also have a tempestuous fight.
As Mildred spends more and more time on her business, expanding to Laguna Beach and Pasadena. The restaurants thrive but her financial obligations are heavy, and when Veda’s piano teacher dies, Mildred showers gifts on her daughter. The seventeen-year-old Veda begins to stay out late, to date many men, and to become “fast” in hopes of a film role.
Then Mrs. Lenhardt, a producer’s wife, shows up unexpectedly in Mildred’s restaurant, insisting that her son Sam will not marry Veda, who says she is pregnant but is in fact faking. Mildred’s old friend Wally reenters the plot to fix this debacle, over the objections of Bert, on whom Mildred leans for help. Veda rebuffs her mother, revealing a mercenary interest in a large settlement from the Lenhardts.
Estranged from everyone, Mildred begins to drink away her days. Six months later Bert informs her that Veda will sing on a nationwide radio program. They listen. Her voice flawless, Veda is a hit as – that worst of all things for Cain - a coloratura soprano.
Mildred schemes to get back Veda through Monty. She befriends him, then marries him and takes over and refurbishes his family mansion. Veda returns, distracted by her popular success, and Mildred ignores the demands of work to attend to her. Wally Burgan, it develops, now owns a share of her business and wants to forces her into bankruptcy. Liquidation of her assets will bring him more than his share of her business income does.
Then Mildred catches Veda and Monty in bed and chokes her, apparently crushing her voice box. But Veda uses this injury to get out of one recording contract and into a better one. Mildred divorces Monty in Nevada and re-marries Bert. She decides to startmaking pies again, and to reestablish a home with Bert and perhaps Veda. But Veda and Monty leave for New York, where she has a $2,500 a week singing job on the “Sunbake Hour.” The novel ends on a with Bert and Mildred, in a “better off without ‘em’” moment, deciding to get drunk, a significantly different ending than the film version.
The much-changed film version of Mildred Pierce (Dir: Michael Curtiz, 1945) starred Joan Crawford, who won the Oscar for Best Actress. It was nominated in five other categories. The cast included Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden, and Ann Blyth. Randall MacDougal, who received the nomination for Best Screenplay, modeled his script on Double Indemnity – the story is a retrospective confession. The film opens with Mildred visiting Monty’s beach house (not in the novel) where he is killed, then moves to the police offices of Inspector Peterson, where the story is told as a murder investigation. The middle of the film does focus on the economic details of Mildred’s restaurants, especially the rise of an auto-and-dining-out culture. In its use of voice-over and its combination of “classic” and noir lighting styles, the film is highly inventive. At the end, in a masterfully choreographed scene, Inspector Peterson reveals that Veda killed Monty.
References and Further Reading
Cain, James M. (1934) The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1936) Double Indemnity. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1937) Serenade. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1940) The Embezzler. New York: Liberty magazine.
____________. (1941) Mildred Pierce. New York: Knopf.
Hoopes, Roy. (1982) Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain . New York: Holt.
New York Times, May 3 – 10, 1927.
Madden, David. (1970) James M. Cain. Boston: Twayne.
____________. (1977) Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Marling, William. (1986) Raymond Chandler. Boston: Twayne.
______________. ( (1995). The American Roman Noir. Athens: U George P.
McShane, Frank, ed. (1981) Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler New York: Columbia UP.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Man Under Sentence of Death,” in Madden, Tough Guy Writers (111-12).
Sikov, Ed. (1999) On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. London: Hyperion.
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