Directed by Michael Curtiz
Screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, James M. Cain
Director of photography: Ernest Haller
Music by Max Steiner Cast: Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden, Ann Blyth, Bruce Bennett
Production: Warner Brothers

This work is both exciting film noir and melodrama, a criticism of Hollywood and at the sametime it places Hollywood on a pedestal. The base work, a hard-boiled detective drama, waswritten by James M. Cain, whose other great creation, The Postman Always Rings Twice, isone of the most frequently adapted literary works. Nor is this the only film version of Mildred Pierce. The Todd Haynes series is much more faithful to the original than MihályKertész’s that has tweaked the blood and tragedy element. But it is precisely this, theKertész ferocity, the segments that diverge from the novel, that make it possible to statethat this film is the strongest adaptation of the Cain work. The most effective reworking ofthe story of a true American woman left by herself, becoming successful as a business woman, and then at the peak of her career battling with her daughter who stole away her own handsome lover.