Where Melodrama meets Film Noir you'll find Mildred Pierce!
Shots ring out on a rainswept night, a tuxedo'd man dies saying "Mildred". Later Mildred, swathed in fur, considers leaping from a pier but instead lures a former business partner to the scene of the crime, putting him in the frame.
Mildred recounts to the police the past four years that has led her from a housewife to the owner of a restaurant chain and, in flashbacks, we see how she sacrificed and bettered herself for the love of her spoilt, snobbish daughter Veda.
Michael Curtiz had not wanted Joan Crawford but she was so determined to play it that she agreed to screen-test for it, her first film under contract with Warner Brothers.
Cleverly playing on her 1930s MGM persona - the shop or factory girl who makes good - Joan is truly magnificent, rightly winning the Best Actress Academy Award.
Shelf or charity shop? On a dark shadowy shelf as befits the Academy Award-nominated Film Noir cinematography of Ernest Haller, MILDRED PIERCE is a glorious film that delivers the hard-edged Warner Brothers style with Curtiz' firm direction, Max Steiner's over-the-top score, the marvellous supporting cast of wolfish Jack Carson, smooth Zachary Scott, nasty Ann Blyth and wise-cracking Eve Arden (the latter both earning their Academy Award nominations) and of course, Joan at her most iconic.
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