Eavesdropping At The Movies

We're joined by Birmingham blogger Laura Creaven (www.constantlycurious.co.uk) for a discussion of our fourth Michael Curtiz film, the film noir Mildred Pierce. We're glad of her perspective, as this is a film all about women, their relationships and desires. We discuss the film's flashback structure - though it helped the film get made in the Hays Code era, would the film be even stronger with a simple chronological plot? Class is everywhere too, motivating the mother-daughter conflict that's central to the film, and we consider America's class system and social mobility, and whether you could tell this story in Britain. We look closely at Curtiz's use of shadows and mirrors to imply off-screen space and create meaningful, poetic images. And there's a lot to discuss in the construction of the characters, both male and female - we think about how masculine and feminine characteristics are deployed in both, and how roles are reversed. Mike and Laura talk about how they each had differing attitudes to the fr