{"id":23603,"date":"2013-06-26T08:28:45","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T13:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=23603"},"modified":"2017-11-20T08:42:23","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T14:42:23","slug":"twice-told-tales-mildred-pierce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2013\/06\/26\/twice-told-tales-mildred-pierce\/","title":{"rendered":"Twice-told tales: MILDRED PIERCE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mildred Pierce<\/strong> (1945).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

At the climax of Now You See Me<\/em>, a barrage of brief shots skips back in time to show how our quartet of magicians pulled off the complicated illusion we\u2019ve just seen. (A very, very complicated illusion, in fact. You and I should be so lucky.) Soon our Four Horsemen come to realize that a puppetmaster behind the scenes has been steering them, and this awareness comes in another flurry of flashbacks.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s movies are constantly using fragmentary flashbacks to fill in elements left out of earlier scenes. I recently considered how Safe Haven<\/em> and Side Effects<\/em> use the convention<\/a>, but lots of other films will furnish examples. Crucial to this technique is an illusion created by cinematic narration. The first time through a scene, we think we\u2019re seeing everything. But the replay shows us bits and pieces that were left out, or that we didn\u2019t notice, or that we\u2019ve forgotten about.<\/p>\n

Back in 1992 I wrote an essay about this technique. “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce<\/em>” focuses on the murder of Monte Beragon in the 1945 film. A revised version of the essay appears in Poetics of Cinema<\/em> and is now available on this website<\/a>. The piece tries to show that a cognitive approach to comprehension and recollection can explain how a film shapes viewers’ responses\u2014in this case, creating mystery while making viewers forget certain things they\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n

Today I\u2019m going to consider Mildred<\/em> again, but by doing something I couldn\u2019t do in print. The wonders of the Internetz let me use video extracts to show concretely how clever this replay is. I frame my case here differently than in the earlier piece, although there are ideas and examples common to both. Perhaps what I do here will tease you into reading the more technical essay.<\/p>\n

And of course there are spoilers<\/strong>\u2014most thoroughly in reference to Mildred<\/em>, more mildly in reference to Side Effects<\/em> and The Unfaithful<\/em> (1947).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hiding murder<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the start of Mildred Pierce<\/em> we see Monte shot down in a beach house, but we don\u2019t see who did it. At the climax of the film, we\u2019ll see a flashback replay the murder, filling in elements that were suppressed in the earlier version. In these sequences, director Michael Curtiz and the film\u2019s screenwriters make choices about at least three narrative conventions.<\/p>\n

How do you present the original scene? How do you handle the flashback? How do you present the replay?<\/p>\n

These choices confront every screenwriter or director who wants the Aha!<\/em> effect of dramatically revealing what was really happening in an earlier sequence.<\/p>\n

The filmmakers\u2019 decisions will be shaped by the urge to make the audience\u2019s pickup fast and effortless. The filmmakers know that we tend to want to cut to the core of a story situation, to grab its gist and move on, and we trust that the film\u2019s unfolding will help us do that. But this very speed can work against us. By counting on our knowledge of conventions, filmmmakers can encourage us to jump to conclusions that will turn out to be inaccurate.<\/p>\n

Start with the handling of the original scene<\/strong>. Your choices are basically these: We can see the action fully, or we can see it only partially, with some aspects suppressed. Consider the opening of The Letter<\/em> (1940). Leslie Crosbie strides out of a cottage, blasting away at a man who tries to crawl away from her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We see the crime fully, so the mystery involves circumstances. What led up to this murder? The rest of the film\u2019s plot will concentrate on that.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, some element of the initial scene can be omitted. This is what we get in the shooting of Miles Archer near the start of The Maltese Falcon<\/em> (1941).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s familiar territory. The film\u2019s narration conceals the identity of the killer by framing him or her out of the shot. The question of who killed Archer will propel part of the action to come.<\/p>\n

The crucial action can be suppressed even more thoroughly. In The Accused<\/em> (1947), a woman is followed into her home. We already know her as a wealthy wife waiting for her husband to come home, but we aren\u2019t shown the identity of the shadowy male figure who grabs her and forces his way into the house.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And the camera stays obstinately outside while someone is shot in the house.<\/p>\n

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Only later will we find out who the victim is, and the entire film will slowly reveal what really happened inside, and what led up to it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll have some things to say about Mildred<\/em>\u2019s initial murder scene shortly, but now let\u2019s consider the second key convention: the flashback device<\/strong> itself. What is a flashback? Most basically, it involves presenting earlier story events in the midst of later ones. It\u2019s often motivated as a memory, as when a woman recalls her childhood. But there doesn\u2019t have to be a memory motivation; the film\u2019s narration can directly show us bits of action that occurred in the past (as in the \u201cobjective\u201d flashbacks in Kubrick\u2019s The Killing<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Mildred Pierce<\/em> is built on three flashbacks. Two long ones explain the course of her life with her family, and a final one dramatizes Mildred\u2019s explanation of what happened during Monte\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n

What, then is a replay, <\/strong>the third convention I’m considering? I don\u2019t think critics and filmmakers have a very stringent sense of this device. (See the codicil for further comments.) I\u2019d suggest that basically a replay is a flashback that revisits scenes we\u2019ve already seen. When our heroine recalls her childhood in scenes we didn\u2019t see before, we have a flashback. But if later in the film we see those childhood scenes again, I\u2019d call it a replay. Centrally, a replay revisits scenes we\u2019ve already witnessed, or at least glimpsed.<\/p>\n

So not all flashbacks are replays. Are all replays flashbacks? Some would say yes, but I\u2019m more cautious. I\u2019m inclined to say that a mechanical recording of a scene shown earlier could count as a replay without being a flashback. In Rebecca<\/em> the newly-married couple watches home movies of their honeymoon. This scene fulfills the function of a flashback, but the action we see remains in the present: the couple are screening the film. The footage doesn\u2019t show scenes we\u2019ve already seen, but if it had, I\u2019d call the screening of the movies a replay, but not a flashback\u2014since, again, the action framing it is visible in the present.<\/p>\n

This sort of mechanical recording\/ replay is very common in modern films, reflecting the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, cellphones, and the like. In an earlier blog entry I talked about a purely auditory replay<\/a> in Sudden Fear<\/em> that\u2019s made possible by an audio recording device. It would be odd to call the home movies or the SoundScriber playback flashbacks.<\/p>\n

So some replays are flashbacks, and some aren’t. When they’re flashbacks, replays are often used subjectively, as when a character remembers an earlier action. Recall all those dream sequences that present, often with distorted imagery or sound, action we\u2019ve seen previously in the film. But a replay may also supply new information about actions we already witnessed and thought we understood. We thought we grasped an earlier scene because nothing signaled to us that pieces of information were missing.<\/p>\n

This possibility goes to another creative option. Sometimes the film tells us that\u00a0something has been omitted. In my\u00a0Maltese Falcon<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Unfaithful<\/em>\u00a0examples, the narration is openly suppressive: It announces that it\u2019s not telling us certain things. This of course adds mystery to the plot.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, the presentation of the initial scene might be covertly<\/em> suppressive; it hides things and doesn\u2019t tell us it\u2019s hiding them. In Side Effects<\/em>, we see the heroine commit murder and then go to bed. Later the murder scene is replayed, but with extra shots showing actions we didn\u2019t see or surmise before. The idea of replaying to fill in previously suppressed information is quite old; you can see it at work in Griffith\u2019s Romance of Happy Valley<\/em>\u00a0 and Ford\u2019s Man Who Shot Liberty Valance<\/em>.\u00a0In modern cinema, we sometimes revisit an earlier scene several times, with each pass yielding new information (e.g.,\u00a0Go<\/em>). You might want to call these \u201cmultiple-draft replays.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mildred<\/em> flashback shows that the initial scene was doubly tricky. It conspicuously<\/em> hides information about the killer, and it inconspicuously<\/em> hides other information about the circumstances. So the climactic flashback fills in information of both sorts: Who did it, and what really happened in the beach house parlor. The obvious suppression of the killer’s identity distracts us from the covert suppression of other items.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So now come the real spoilers<\/strong>.<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gunplay and replay<\/strong><\/p>\n

We start with two establishing views of the beach house, with a car outside. Over the second, gunshots are heard. Shot by an unknown assassin, Monte staggers forward and falls back onto the carpet. A close shot shows him saying, \u201cMildred\u201d as he dies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The camera tracks to the bullet-riddled mirror and we hear the sound of a a door. A new shot lingers on Monte’s corpse. We then see the car drive off.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next scene shows Mildred pacing nervously on the pier.<\/p>\n

I think that this opening lays out two options, one for the trusting viewer and one for a more skeptical one. The trusting viewer assumes that Mildred killed Monte. He seems to glance at her as he speaks her name, and the shot of the car pulling away leads smoothly to the sequence showing Mildred on the pier.<\/p>\n

Not so fast, says the skeptical viewer. If Mildred did it, why doesn’t the film show her doing it, as the Letter<\/em> scene does? The absence of a reverse shot of the killer resembles the missing reverse shot in the Maltese Falcon<\/em> scene. So the scene leaves some doubt about whether Mildred is guilty.<\/p>\n

The film rushes us along, so we aren\u2019t obliged to decide one way or the other. Eventually we can reconcile the opening with either possibility. If Mildred turns out to be innocent, we can say the film played fair by not showing the killer. If she turns out to be guilty, the missing reverse shot will be seen as simply a device to postpone telling us.<\/p>\n

She certainly acts guilty enough in what follows. On the pier, she seems to consider leaping into the surf, only to be put off by a cop on a beat. The lubricious Wally lures her into his tavern, where she stares coldly at him before suggesting they go to the beach house. There, she locks him in, and he discovers Monte\u2019s corpse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Passing policemen in a patrol car see Wally break out of the house and arrest him on the beach. Mildred\u2019s daughter Veda is briefly introduced at their home, when two policemen come to take Mildred in for questioning. She seems to feign ignorance of Monte\u2019s death, still trying to frame Wally.<\/p>\n

At the headquarters, the police inspector announces that they have the killer\u2014not Wally but Mildred\u2019s first husband Bert. Distraught, she claims Bert is innocent and to exonerate him she tells her story, taking us through her two marriages and her successful career.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the climax of Mildred’s second flashback, she realizes that Monte\u2019s free-spending ways have enabled Wally to cheat her out of her restaurant chain. She fetches a pistol and drives to the beach house, in a framing that reminds the first-time viewer of the film\u2019s opening shots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We see her walk through the house, but then the flashback breaks off. We\u2019re taken back to the present, with her talking to the chief detective. \u201cMonte was alone, and I killed him.\u201d \u00a0The detective replies that she\u2019s lying; someone else was in the house. Who?\u00a0Not Bert but Veda, brought in by the cops who have grabbed her when she tried to leave town.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Before Mildred can hush her, Veda snaps out, \u201cYou promised not to tell! You promised! You said you\u2019d help me get away!\u201d Veda became increasingly important to the plot as the years went by in Mildred’s flashbacks, but her almost total absence from the opening minutes blocks our thinking of her as a candidate for the killer’s role. Soon we’ll see the pains the narration took to make sure we didn’t spot her at the crime scene.<\/p>\n

Mildred breaks down and launches the final flashback.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

She says that she found Veda with Monte, and they admitted to being lovers.\u00a0Then Veda told her that she and Monte would be married. Mildred reached for the pistol but was halted by Monte and dropped the gun. She left, just before Monte told Veda he had no intention of marrying her. “You don’t really think I could be in love with a rotten little tramp like you, do you?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The flashback crosscuts between Mildred in the car and what\u2019s happening inside, bringing us back to the opening situation. Now the skeptical viewer\u2019s hunch is borne out. The replay starts as a faithful version of what we originally saw, providing the reverse shot of Veda that was missing in the opening.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This time we don’t see Monte hit (that action is covered by the shot of Veda), but he crumples and staggers forward as before. He dies, still murmuring Mildred\u2019s name. Mildred hurries in, finds her daughter standing over Monte’s body, and succumbs to Veda\u2019s demand that she cover for her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The replay explains why Mildred contemplated drowning herself afterward: She was in despair at the couple\u2019s treachery and the crime that Veda committed. When suicide was blocked, Mildred tried to frame Wally for the murder in order to protect Veda. And the replay suggests that it\u2019s not Mildred but Veda who drives off from beach house, leaving Mildred to drift down to the pier.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All together now<\/strong><\/p>\n

At least, that\u2019s what most viewers would remember as happening. My essay argues that it\u2019s just this broad effect that the movie aims for: we recall the gist of the murder situation, and we assume that the only gap in it is the identity of the killer. However, when we look more closely at the two sequences, we see that Curtiz and his colleagues have covertly concealed a lot more.<\/p>\n

To get a sense of it, you can run the two sequences separately, then the two of them jigsawed together side by side. In the following clip, the opening is labeled scene A, the flashback replay is scene B. The shots in each passage are numbered. (In the original essay<\/a>, they’re laid out in a chart.)<\/p>\n