Mildred Pierce

Having made the acquaintance of Mildred Pierce, more or less by chance, back in 2018, one of our lock-down activities has been to deepen that acquaintance. Having watched the mini series again at some point in the interval, we now did the film of 1945 (with Joan Crawford), the mini series of 2011 (with Kate Winslet) and lastly the book of 1941.

Plenty of scope for playing spot the difference between the three renderings, with the mini series sticking much closer to the original than the film. To the point of making use of quite a lot of dialogue, more or less unchanged.

Not usually a great fan of Kate Winslet, but I thought she was well cast here. As were the other principal characters. A well made entertainment. A morality tale about not trying to live the high life through one's children.

More from the book than from the films, we get to learn quite a lot about the nuts and bolts of running mid-market restaurants - with lots of books of this sort providing interest for the chaps with lots of more or less technical details about something or other. To give them a break from all that relationship stuff.

First time around, I had found the coloratura soprano sub-plot rather improbable: that a girl could do piano until her late teens and then turn into a star singer before she was twenty. While being thoroughly unpleasant while she was at it. A sub-plot which turns out to have been lifted more or less unchanged from the novel - with Cain's mother having been a failed opera singer and he himself once having had aspirations - so he presumably knows something about that business too. And very much a contemporary of Simenon.

Reading the novel, I was very much reminded of the elementary fact that a novel can do stuff which is difficult in a film. A novel has a narrator who can tell us lots of stuff about what is going on which can be hard to get into a film script, despite the saying about a picture being worth a thousand words. Stuff which rounds this story out a bit, makes it seem more plausible than either of the film versions. A telling which can be managed without needing to be a great author, never mind a Shakespeare - that megastar script writer from another era.

While this afternoon I was curious about Orange Grove Avenue, somewhere in Glendale or Pasadena, where the big house was, and while the avenue exists, possibly several of them, I failed to find any big houses. An estate agent turned up the yellow one above, for something under $2m - rather ordinary looking for that sort of money by the standards of Surrey - and Street View doesn't turn up anything grander, at least not on a casual look, and one of the views was more or less under a freeway. Perhaps location is everything and people will pay a fortune for the right zip code. Perhaps Cain just liked the name.

PS 1: I feel sure we have heard a coloratura soprano somewhere, but can't presently find her. Perhaps she will turn up later.

PS 2: up bright and early this Saturday morning to check and find that the soprano in question came from a well known musical family in Teheran. The occasion was noticed at reference 6, the lady at reference 7 - which includes a not very Islamic portrait. In the Mildred story set in the US in the 1930's, the aspirant soprano does spots on commercial radio shows. While in the G&S story put on in the new millennium, she gets parts with the likes of the Epsom Light Opera Company.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=mildred+pierce.

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1492030/. The five episode mini series from 2011.

Reference 3: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037913/. The 1945 film.

Reference 4: Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain - 1941. The book that started it all.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_M._Cain.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/pinafore.html

Reference 7: http://www.parvazensemble.co.uk/honeyrouhani.html.

Reference 8: http://www.honeyrouhani.co.uk/. The real thing.

Reference 9: https://women.ncr-iran.org/2020/10/14/rural-women-of-iran/. On this account, under the mullahs, any kind of life for a rural lady is a bit grim, never mind a musical life. And one supposes that things are much the same to the east, that is to say in most of Afghanistan and in the uplands of Pakistan.