10 great Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s

Hankies at the ready for our rundown of Hollywood’s great misty-eyed melodramas of the 1940s, from Mildred Pierce to Now, Voyager.

29 July 2021

By  Pamela Hutchinson

mildred pierce music now voyager

It’s tricky enough to define what makes a melodrama at the best of times, but even more so when your eyes are misty with tears. Melodrama is better understood as a mode than a genre, as academic Linda Williams argued, and the meaning of the word has shifted over time: from an action-packed thriller to a heartbreaking drama.

In 1940s Hollywood, the privations of the war years and a disruption to gender roles led to the rise of a new female-led film. The woman’s picture, usually a three-handkerchief weepie, revolves around a powerhouse performance from a star actress. Despite stories filled with loss and sacrifice, the best of these melodramas provided a welcome rush of empowerment: audiences saw shadows of their real-life struggles on screen, and for mature actresses, they offered substantial, often award-worthy roles.

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Bette Davis lobbied Warner Bros to play the lead role of Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager (1942), and her impeccable performance in this archetypal woman’s picture was rewarded with yet another Oscar nomination. Joan Crawford reignited her career with Mildred Pierce (1945) – and she did win the Oscar. As did many other stars of 1940s melodramas, including Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Jane Wyman and Olivia de Havilland – twice. I’ve chosen only one film per actress for this list, which wasn’t easy. Davis and Crawford could fill the page alone. We can only sob over the absence of films starring Wyman, Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, Susan Hayward, Joan Bennett, Jennifer Jones and Margaret Sullavan.

The 1940s melodrama gets even more interesting when it collides with other genres or modes, as in the great noir-melodramas, from Mildred Pierce to Leave Her to Heaven (1945) to Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). By picturing women fighting to find their place, these films appeal to all kinds of marginalised audiences. The woman’s picture can be subversive or conservative, gritty or camp, cynically sentimental or heartstoppingly poignant. There’s more to the 1940s melodrama than meets your brimming eye.

Kitty Foyle (1940)

Director: Sam Wood

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Ginger Rogers is more renowned for her comedy and her tapdancing, but she won serious plaudits when she tackled this tragic role. Kitty is a working-class woman grappling with a romantic dilemma familiar to many a melodrama heroine: should she follow the man she loves most, even though he’s married and socially from another world, or accept a proposal of marriage from her less-romantic, totally available boyfriend? As Kitty tries to make up her mind, she recalls her painful romantic history in flashback, including divorce and a lost baby.

The film’s prologue puts Kitty’s story in a historical context, introducing the changing status of women in the early 20th century: no longer on a Victorian pedestal but newly enfranchised to vote, and expected to earn their own living. Kitty, who contemplates a life and motherhood outside marriage and expects to be punished for it, is a child of her time. But Kitty’s assertion about what women truly want is intended to be universal, and resonates through so many of these films: “It isn’t men, not really. It’s something down inside of them that’s the future.”

Penny Serenade (1941)

Director: George Stevens

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Irene Dunne and Cary Grant had already made a hilarious couple, playing sharp-tongued estranged spouses in both The Awful Truth (1937) and My Favorite Wife (1940). Their reunion was not such a cheery affair, though they play it beautifully. Dunne and Grant play a young couple whose dreams of starting a family suffer some painful setbacks – arguably it’s the suggestion of comedy (a napkin tied around an alarm clock while the baby sleeps, etc), and the natural chemistry between the leads, that makes the film all the more poignant.

Penny Serenade has an episodic structure, with each flashback linked by the playing of sentimental songs – a nod to melodrama’s etymological root as a “drama with music”. Dunne later said she loved the film because it reminded her of her own adopted daughter, while Grant – whose first and only child was born in 1966 – channelled his own broodiness into his performance, which he considered his best. It earned him his first Oscar nod.

Now, Voyager (1942)

Director: Irving Rapper

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In this hit adaptation of an Olive Higgins Prouty novel, Bette Davis stars as Charlotte Vale, a woman deemed too dowdy for romance but who ultimately becomes too good for it. She’s a lonely spinster, living with an overbearing mother (Gladys Cooper) who batters her self-esteem daily. Charlotte is just a hair’s breadth from a complete mental breakdown when kindly Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains) takes her into his sanatorium, and gives her a mental health makeover – as well as a taste of freedom from her maternal tyrant.

It’s on board a cruise ship, reinvigorated and dressed for success, that Charlotte meets the love of her life, Jerry (Paul Henreid), but their relationship cannot survive on dry land. Before renouncing the role of mistress, Charlotte proves herself capable of being the perfect wife and mother. It’s a film packed with iconic moments, from the lovers’ shared cigarettes to Charlotte’s glamorous reveal underneath a wide-brimmed hat and her deathless line: “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Director: William Wyler

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Leads in 1940s melodrama often find the role of wife and mother a challenge, but Mrs Miniver, played with aplomb by Greer Garson, rises to any occasion. In this Oscar-winning wartime melodrama set in the English Home Counties but made in the States, Garson plays the plucky matriarch of a comfortable family of five. Her eldest son enlists in the RAF , and her husband (Walter Pidgeon) rushes to help with the Dunkirk evacuation, but Mrs Miniver has to contend with the home front, including a German pilot who holds her at gunpoint in her own kitchen – whom she disarms with impressive sang-froid, naturally.

Grief, and romantic subplots, make this a true tearjerker, but it’s the patriotic speech delivered by the local vicar in the bomb-damaged church that gave Mrs. Miniver irresistible propaganda value. Though the image of Garson reading aloud Alice in Wonderland to her children during an air raid didn’t hurt.

Gaslight (1944)

Director: George Cukor

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The epitome of the paranoid melodrama, the better-known of two film adaptations of Patrick Hamilton’s play, and something of a period film noir, this is a psychological thriller set in Edwardian England. In this version Ingrid Bergman plays the young bride and Charles Boyer her cruel husband, who is determined to make her believe that she’s losing her mind, just to cover up his own murderous misdeeds.

Bergman’s performance of naive vulnerability, and her enjoyable final-act revenge scene, provide the heart in this chilling tale. The dynamic between her and Boyer, while part of a sensationalist murder plotline, is also a rather vivid depiction of domestic emotional abuse, and it’s no doubt due to the huge success of this film that the term ‘gaslighting’ is so widely used and understood. Don’t miss a young Angela Lansbury as the couple’s pouting housemaid.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Director: Michael Curtiz

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If a film is told in flashback, chances are it’s a film noir or a melodrama, and this superb movie is both. It also gave Crawford a role to die for, and breathed new life into her career. James M. Cain’s source novel may have been attempting to show why women were better off at home rather than entering the workforce, but this triumphant role was exactly the kickstart the star needed. And she always argued that her tough upbringing improved her performance: “I think I was getting ready for Mildred Pierce when I was a kid, waiting on tables and cooking.”

Crawford plays the eponymous housewife, who goes back to work after separating from her husband. It’s a slog, but she builds up an impressive restaurant business to provide her daughters with everything they could ever need. But her vicious eldest daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) is far from content with what she has or grateful for the sacrifices her mother has made, and Mildred’s reign as mistress of her own life must come to an end.

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Director: John M. Stahl

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One of the bleakest of film noirs, but one photographed in lustrous, sun-soaked Technicolor too. Leave Her to Heaven is directed by one of the acknowledged masters of the melodrama: John M. Stahl had been making weepies since the silent era, and two of his films would famously be remade (or rather their source novels re-adapted) by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s: Imitation of Life (193⅘9) and Magnificent Obsession (1935/54).

Here, Gene Tierney turns in a bone-chilling performance as the antiheroine – psychopathic socialite Ellen. Far more sympathetic are her unlucky husband Richard (Cornel Wilde), and cousin Ruth (Jeanne Crain), who’ll both face trial for her violent crimes. The melodramatic thread running through all this is Ellen’s psychological damage (she’s essentially riddled with jealousy), her determination to win independence at all costs and the tragic loss of innocent lives. Then there’s Richard, a melodramatic man trapped in a toxic marriage.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Director: Lewis Milestone

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Barbara Stanwyck was a doyenne of melodrama, though perhaps her most iconic roles in this vein came in the 1930s (Stella Dallas) or 1950s (There’s Always Tomorrow). In the 1940s Stanwyck starred in a run of noir-melodramas, including this gritty saga written by Robert Rossen, in which she plays the title character.

It’s a luridly violent and cynical tale. First we’ll see Martha’s early years, under the guardianship of her bullying aunt – and the deadly night that changes the course of her life. Then Stanwyck enters as the adult Martha, rich and successful in business, but trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience to alcoholic attorney Walter (Kirk Douglas, brilliant in his debut role). When her childhood friend Sam (Van Heflin) drifts back into town, she has to confront the terrible mistakes she made and run the risk of repeating them. Can Sam give up the attentions of his new lady friend (Lizabeth Scott) to rekindle such a strange love affair?

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

Director: Max Ophüls

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One of cinema’s greatest evocations of unrequited love, Max Ophüls’ adaptation of a Stefan Zweig novella stars Joan Fontaine as Lisa, the ‘unknown woman’ of the title, who falls headfirst for Stefan (Louis Jourdan), a handsome concert pianist who lives in her building. We first hear her voice in the letter she writes to him from hospital: “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead.” If the crisis in a woman’s picture is almost always a question of “if only” and “too late”, Lisa’s deathbed declaration of love may beat them all.

The setting is early turn-of-the-century Vienna, lavishly recreated on a Hollywood soundstage, and captured by Ophüls’ signature baroque camera movements. A collection of comic characters shake the sentimentality out of Lisa’s tragic tale, and Fontaine channels the same nervy youthfulness that she showed to great effect in Rebecca (1940) and Jane Eyre (1943), though this performance was surely her finest and most purely poignant.

The Heiress (1949)

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The second Wyler film in this list and, frankly, there could have been many more. Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted their own play, which was based on Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square. In the vein of Charlotte Vale, the heiress in question is the supposedly dull and dumpy Catherine Sloper, who stands to inherit her cruel doctor father’s fortune – and is played by Olivia de Havilland.

When a handsome Montgomery Clift comes to court her, Catherine is swiftly besotted, but her father (a brilliantly spiky Ralph Richardson) pours scorn on the romance. It seems Catherine is destined to have her heart broken whatever happens, but perhaps there is a way that she can claim her independence and save her dignity instead. De Havilland is tremendous, the final scene is one of the greatest in golden age Hollywood, and the score by Aaron Copland is cleverly muted, minimalist and period-appropriate.

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SongHall SONGSWRITTERS HALL OF FAME

Father of Film Music

Max Steiner

Won very first Oscar ever awarded in 1935

The late Max Steiner was one of the true pioneers of the genre known as movie music. In fact, Steiner was awarded the very first Oscar citation ever given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his score for The Informer in 1935. Born Maximilian Raoul Steiner in Vienna, Austria on May 10, 1888, Max grew up surrounded by music. A close family friend was Johann Strauss and both his father and grandfather were active Operetta producers. Steiner was trained in the classic European tradition, attending the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna and completing the prescribed five?year program of courses in one and one half years and received the Academy’s Gold Medal. At 14, he wrote and conducted his first operetta, "Beautiful Greek Girl," which ran for a full year at The Orpheum Theater in Vienna. In 1904, Steiner journeyed out of Austria for the first time, to England, where he conducted at Daly's Theater, The Adelphi Theater, The Hippodrome and the London Opera House. In 1914, Steiner accepted conducting stints in the Alhambra Theater in Paris and The Winter Garden in Blackpool. Just prior to the opening of World War 1, Steiner accepted an invitation from the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld to come to America and conduct the Ziegfeld productions. Over the following years, he led many theater bands, toured, and became the chief orchestrator for Harms Music Company. At this leading music house in New York City, Max came into contact with some of America's best composers including Jerome Kern , Victor Herbert , Vincent Youmans , and George Gershwin , to name a few. Achieving U.S. citizenship immediately following ?the close of the war, Steiner continued his busy schedule of conducting and brought his composing skills to the fore once again. In 1929, he moved west to become General Musical Director for RKO Studios, which resulted in a series of musical scores for such motion pictures as King Kong , Lost Patrol and The Informer . In his journey through the world of Hollywood musicals , Steiner composed a veritable host of memorable scores for Casablanca , Since You Went Away , Tomorrow Is Forever , The Charge of the Light Brigade , Mildred Pierce , Now Voyager , Stolen Life and San Antonio among others. Following his initial Oscar for The Informer he won two others for his scores for Now Voyager in 1943, and for Since You Went Away in 1945. Over the period of his Hollywood career, Max Steiner received 18 Academy Award nominations. Interestingly enough, his most acclaimed work, the background score for Gone with the Wind , which included the most familiar of all his works, "Tara's Theme," never won an Oscar nor any other award. The entire score was written by Steiner-under special assignment from producer David Selznick-in less than three months time. Max Steiner, arguably one of the 20th century's most distinguished composers, died December 28, 1971 at age 83.

Wrote scores for "Gone With The Wind" and "King Kong"

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mildred pierce music now voyager

Max Steiner: The Father of Film Music

"Arial",sans-serif’>Let’s start at the very beginning, the silent era of films, when film music was provided by each individual theater. It was either performed live with musicians or by a phonograph. Once synchronizing music and sound to celluloid became possible in 1929, a new profession was born.

"Arial",sans-serif’>Known as the “father of film music,” Max Steiner , composed the 1933 score for King Kong and was one of the true pioneers of the genre known as movie music. Steiner was awarded the very first Oscar ever given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his score for normal’>The Informer in 1935. He was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score for Life with Father .

"Arial",sans-serif’>The film became a landmark of film scoring, as it showed the power of music to manipulate audience emotions. And normal’>King Kong could be said to be the most influential music score of all time because it completely established the grammar of film music, including the use of the leitmotif the device of the recurring musical theme often associated with Wagner and German opera.

"Arial",sans-serif’>Born Maximilian Raoul Steiner in Vienna, Austria on May 10, 1888, Steiner grew up surrounded by music. His father and grandfather were active operetta producers. Steiner was trained in the classic European tradition, attending the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna and completing the five-year program in one and half years, receiving the Academy’s Gold Medal. At the age of 14, he wrote and conducted his first operetta, ‘Beautiful Greek Girl,’ which ran for a full year at The Orpheum Theater in Vienna.

"Arial",sans-serif’>During his long and successful career in Hollywood, Steiner composed memorable scores for Casablanca, Since You Went Away, Tomorrow Is Forever, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Mildred Pierce, Now, Voyager, Stolen Life and normal’>San Antonio among others. Steiner received over eighteen Academy Award nominations. Interestingly his most acclaimed work, normal’>Gone with the Wind , which included the most popular of all his works, ‘Tara’s Theme,’ never won an Oscar or any other award.

"Arial",sans-serif’>The score for Jezebel , a film that won Bette Davis an Oscar, Steiner scored the music to match exactly what the musical pitch of Davis’ voice was. Bette Davis once said, “He was my composer.” because she knew what value he brought to her films. When Steiner saw Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca or Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, he was very affected by them, not just because they were beautiful women, but he really fell in love with those characters. He could not only be Humphrey Bogart and feel the intoxicating romance, but at the same time, he could also channel his incredible feminine side and write in the voice of the dying Bette Davis in Dark Victory , or normal’>Now, Voyager , in which she is a repressed woman emerging, write music that sounds completely from her soul.

"Arial",sans-serif’>Steiner often followed his instincts in creating film scores. When he chose to use classical music for normal’>Gone with the Wind , he stated: ‘It is my conviction that familiar music, however popular, does not aid the underlying score of a dramatic picture. I believe that, while the American people are more musically minded than any other nation in the world, they are still not entirely familiar with all the old and new masters’ works. Of course, there are many in our industry who disagree with my viewpoint’.

"Arial",sans-serif’>Steiner was among the first to acknowledge the need for original scores in films and he felt knowing when to start and stop was the hardest part of proper scoring, since the incorrect placement of music can speed up a scene meant to be slow and vice versa.

"Arial",sans-serif’>’Knowing the difference is what makes a film composer. I’ve always tried to subordinate myself to the picture. A lot of composers make the mistake of thinking of film as a concert platform on which they can show off. This is not the place. If you get too decorative, you lose your appeal to the emotions. My theory is that music should be felt rather than heard.’

"Arial",sans-serif’>The United States Postal Service issued its ‘American Music Series’ stamps on September 16, 1999, to pay tribute to renowned Hollywood composers, after Steiner’s death in December 1971.

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"Arial",sans-serif’>Now referred to as the ‘dean of film music,’ Steiner had written or arranged music for over three hundred films. George Korngold, son of Erich Korngold, produced the Classic Film Score Series albums which included the music of Steiner. Albert K. Bender established the Max Steiner Music Society with an international membership, publishing journals and newsletters and a library of audio recordings. The Max Steiner Memorial Society was formed in the United Kingdom continues the work of the Max Steiner Music Society.

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Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, michael curtiz, joan crawford, jack carson, zachary scott, photos & videos, technical specs.

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After her second husband, Monte Beragon, is murdered in her beachfront house, Mildred Pierce lures longtime acquaintance Wally Fay to the house and then runs away, leaving him with the body. A short time later, Mildred returns to her Pasadena house to find the police and her daughter Veda waiting for her. At the police station, Mildred describes the events that led to Monte's murder: Four years earlier, Mildred's first husband Bert is making a good living in real estate with Wally, who is his partner. After Bert loses his job, however, he quarrels frequently with Mildred over her indulgent treatment of their daughters Veda and Kay. An especially bitter quarrel drives Bert to leave Mildred for his mistress, Mrs. Maggie Biederhof. Kay is upset by her father's departure, but the older Veda is only concerned with how the family will manage financially. When Wally makes a pass at Mildred, Veda suggests that Mildred marry him so that they can get a new house and a maid, but Mildred rejects the notion. Because she has been a housewife from age seventeen, Mildred is only able to find a job as a waitress, but she works hard and bakes pies for extra income. When the snobbish Veda ridicules her mother for working as a waitress, even though this work has paid for her expensive singing lessons, Mildred decides to open her own restaurant. With Wally's help, she buys a house in Glendale from the Beragon estate and remodels it. One day, when Bert takes the girls to Lake Arrowhead, Monte Beragon, the building's former owner, invites Mildred for a swim at his beach house. Later, Mildred returns home and finds Bert waiting with the news that Kay is seriously ill with pneumonia. After Kay dies, Mildred becomes even more determined to provide Veda with the best of everything. Mildred's restaurant is very successful, and soon she owns a chain of restaurants. In the meantime, after her divorce from Bert, Mildred becomes increasingly involved with Monte, giving him money to support his wealthy, idle way of life, but later breaks off the relationship because she believes that he is a bad influence on Veda. Veda makes a secret marriage with wealthy Ted Forrester, and when his parents insist on an annulment, she falsely claims to be pregnant. Wally negotiates a large financial settlement from the Forresters, but when Mildred learns that Veda lied about her pregnancy, she tears up the check and sends her daughter away. Mildred relents, however, after Veda takes a job as a singer in Wally's nightclub. In order to give Veda the socially prominent life she desires, Mildred then arranges to marry Monte in exchange for a third of her successful business. Monte squanders Mildred's money, causing her to lose her business to Wally. After telling the police her story, Mildred confesses to murdering Monte. The police then question Veda, who admits she shot Monte, with whom she was having an affair, after he refused to marry her. Veda blames Mildred for making her the way she is, but Mildred finally washes her hands of her daughter and rejoins the loyal Bert outside the police station.

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Bruce Bennett

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Lee Patrick

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Moroni Olsen

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Veda Ann Borg

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Jo Ann Marlowe

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George Tobias

Barbara brown.

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Butterfly Mcqueen

Charles trowbridge, john compton, george anderson, johnny walsh.

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Mary servoss, manart kippen, chester clute, wallis clark, perk lazelle, joan winfield, john christian.

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Marion lessing, doria caron, marjorie kane, elyse brown.

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Ramsay Ames

Helen pender, dick kipling, wheaton chambers, william ruhl, jeanne wardley, george meader, harold miller, mary ellen meyran, jean lorraine, bob locke lorraine, gerald w. alexander, eddie allen, milo anderson, harry barndollar, clayton brackett, frank burkett, geraldine cole, russell collings, bill cooley, herschel daugherty, lucien denni, paul detlefsen, frank evans, william faulkner, leo f. forbstein, charles david forrest, hugh friedhofer, oliver s. garretson, milton gold, james goldenhaur, margaret gruen, ernest haller, frank heath, george james hopkins, mario larrinaga, james leicester, roger lewis, ranald macdougall, albert maltz, john mitchell, louise randall pierson, herbert plews, william schurr, rene steffen, max steiner, jeanette storck, catherine turney, bertram tuttle, willard van enger, jack l. warner, robert g. wayne, david weisbart, perc westmore, margaret buell wilder, levi c. williams, thames williamson, s. e. young, photo collections.

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Best Actress

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Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young. - Ida
Leave something on me--I might catch cold. - Ida
Oh boy! I'm so smart it's a disease! - Wally Fay
I'm sorry I did that... I'd of rather cut off my hand - Mildred Pierce
With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls. - Veda Pierce Forrester

Bette Davis turned down the title role, and Barbara Stanwyck was very keen to take it, but Joan Crawford got in first and earned her an Academy Award.

Shirley Temple was originally considered for the part of Veda Pierce.

Shooting the early scenes, director Michael Curtiz accused Crawford of needlessly glamorizing her working mother role. She insisted she was buying her character's clothes off the rack, but didn't mention that her own dressmaker was fitting the waists and padding out the shoulders.

Monty's Beach House, used in the key opening scene and several others, was actually owned by the film's director, Michael Curtiz. It was built in 1929 and stood at 26652 Latigo Shore Dr. in Malibu. It collapsed into the ocean after a week of heavy storms in January 1983.

William Faulkner contributed to the script, but his additions were not used. He wrote a scene that had Butterfly McQueen consoling Joan while singing a gospel song.

The film's working title was House on the Sand . Files on the film included in the Warner Bros. Collection at the USC Cinema-Television Library add the following information about the production: When studio executive Jack L. Warner proposed filming the James M. Cain novel, Joseph I. Breen of the MPPA wrote in a letter dated February 2, 1944, "...the story contains so many sordid and repellent elements that we feel the finished picture would not only be highly questionable from the standpoint of the Code, but would, likewise, meet with a great deal of difficulty in its release...." Breen went on to suggest that the story be dismissed from further consideration. The major changes made by the writers to conform to the Code involved the elimination of overt references to extra-marital sex and the blackening of Veda's character. "Monte's" murder was added by the screenwriters for dramatic purposes.        Producer Jerry Wald wanted Ralph Bellamy for the role of "Bert;" Donald Woods was also considered for the part and George Coulouris tested for it. Bonita Granville, Virginia Weidler and Martha Vickers tested for the part of "Veda." Modern sources add that Jack Carson was also considered for the part of "Monte." Some scenes were filmed on location in Glendale and Malibu, CA. The U.S. Navy granted permission to film in Malibu despite wartime restrictions, but asked to be allowed to view all footage shot there. In 1983, the Malibu house used in the film collapsed into the sea after a week of storms. Other than a brief appearance in Warner Bros.' Hollywood Canteen , this film was the first that Joan Crawford made for Warner Bros. According to information included in the file on the film in the Warner Bros. Collection, Cain sent a first edition of the novel to Crawford on March 7, 1946, which was inscribed, "To Joan Crawford, who brought Mildred to life just as I had always hoped she would be and who has my lifelong gratitude." In the November 2, 1946 issue of Saturday Evening Post , Crawford named "Mildred Pierce" as the role she liked best.        Crawford's performance in this film earned her her only Academy Award. The film helped redefine Crawford's image, and modern critics have noted that she was subsequently thought of as an actress as well as a star. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture; Eve Arden and Ann Blyth were both nominated for Oscars for Best Supporting Actress; Ernest Haller was nominated for his cinematography and Randall MacDougall received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. According to modern sources, writer Catherine Turney was credited on some release prints, but chose to have her name removed. Among the many versions of the screenplay, William Faulkner's rewrite differed significantly from the others, according to modern sources. He wrote an elaborate voice-over narration and concentrated on Mildred's restaurant business, describing sleazy, underhanded business dealings. Veda is even more calculating and cold than she appears in the final film. Modern sources add that because of script problems some of the film was improvised by the actors together with director Michael Curtiz. Zachary Scott reprised his role in a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on June 6, 1949, co-starring Rosalind Russell, and in a second Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on June 14, 1954, co-starring Claire Trevor. He also reprised the role in a Lux Video Theatre program on September 20, 1956, co-starring Virginia Bruce, and in a second Lux radio broadcast on June 14, 1954, co-starring Claire Trevor. Scott also reprised the role in a Lux Video Theatre program on September 20, 1956, co-starring Virginia Bruce.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States Winter January 1, 1945

Released in United States October 20, 1945

Broadcast over TNT (colorized version) July 19, 1991.

Restored print re-released in London, England April 13. 2001.

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“Now, Voyager”: Why the 1942 screen classic with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid will never age

mildred pierce music now voyager

“Box office dynamite—that’s ‘Now, Voyager’.” Those are the first words of Naka ‘s “Now Voyager” Variety film review, as published August 19, 1942. Continuing in the very same review: ‘Here is drama heavily steeped in the emotional tide that has swept its star, Bette Davis, to her present crest, and it’s the kind of drama that maintains Warners’ pattern for box office success. (…) It affords Miss Davis one of her superlative acting roles, that of a neurotic spinster fighting to free herself from the shackles of a tyrannical mother. (…)  For Henreid, perhaps, this is his top role in American pictures; he neatly dovetails and makes believable the sometimes underplayed character of the man who finds love too late.’

Now Voyager 01 on the set

The film tells the story of Boston heiress Charlotte Vale (in the beginning unglamorously portrayed by Bette Davis), a sheltered, frumpy, and middle-aged neurotic who is driven to a nervous breakdown by her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper), but with the help of a soft-spoken idealized therapist (Claude Rains), she is transformed into a modern, secure and attractive young woman. During an ocean voyage to South America, she meets a suave man, Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), and blooms as a woman. Durrance, unhappily married to a woman he dares not to hurt, has a young daughter Tina (played by the then twelve-year-old promising juvenile actress Janis Wilson in an uncredited role). She is an emotionally depressed child victimized by the insecurity of their unsettled home. Ultimately, Charlotte Vale and Jerry Durrance end up in a platonic relationship in which she keeps Tina, who in the meantime, is in the process of recovering, while Henreid stays with his unwanted wife.

Now Voyager 06

“Now, Voyager” is an unabashed first-rate soap opera—or a woman’s picture, if you wish—and as such, it’s one of the very best of its kind, thanks to Warner Bros. expertise. At the same time, the powerful drama is backed by Max Steiner’s lush and Academy Award-winning musical score which is almost as much a part of the film as the actors. Bette Davis, one of Hollywood’s queens in the 1940s, made the film’s heroine a touching, dignified, and truly believable woman.

Miss Davis was not the first choice to play the role of Charlotte Vale, though. Irene Dunne, along with Charles Boyer, her co-star in “Love Affair” (1939), were considered to be perfect for the leading roles. Producer Hal B. Wallis also offered the female lead to Norma Shearer, and although she was fond of it, she had already made up her mind to retire from the screen after George Cukor’s “Her Cardboard Lover” (1942), due to her eye problems. When Irene Dunne heard that the script had also been discussed with Norma Shearer, she declined as well, fearing that both actresses were played against each other. Then Ginger Rogers was offered the part. She liked it, but weeks passed by for her to reply, and even after Wallis sent her a wire while she was on her ranch on the Rogue River, she did not respond, so finally the part went to Bette Davis, who was eager to play it.

One of the most famous and landmark scenes of the film is when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes simultaneously and gallantly hands one of the cigarettes to Bette Davis, thereby starting a new custom (in an era when people obviously weren’t aware of the danger of smoking). The film became highly successful: “Now, Voyager” was Warner Bros.’s fourth biggest grossing film of 1942.

Compared to the then-established two-time Academy Award-winner Bette Davis, Mr. Henreid only had a few years of experience in Hollywood. After leaving Austria in the mid-1930s, he first settled in London and then moved on to the West Coast. So, although pretty much a newcomer in Hollywood when “Now, Voyager” was made, his performance was well-received. The New York Herald Tribune wrote, ‘Paul Henreid achieves his full stature as a romantic star’ while Time praised him as ‘Hollywood’s likeliest leading man who acts like a kind and morally responsible human being.’

Ladies Man

In his autobiography “Ladies Man” (1984), Paul Henreid remembers Bette Davis as ‘a solid master of her craft’: “I found her a delight to work with, and we got along famously. In fact, a very close friendship started between us, and she remained a dear, close friend—and always a very decent human being.” The atmosphere on the set was amiable and supportive, although Miss Davis did have problems with her co-star Bonita Granville (who played the part of Charlotte’s young niece June Vale). “She was bitchy in the film and off. I don’t remember the details, but she struck me as flighty and gossipy,” she told Boze Hadleigh in his interview book “Bette Davis Speaks” (1996).

Principal photography of “Now, Voyager” began on the Warner lot on April 7, 1942, and ended on June 23, with retakes on July 3. The film was released in the U.S. on October 31, 1942. “Casablanca,” another Hal B. Wallis production, also starring Paul Henreid and Claude Rains (a frequent performer in Wallis’ pictures), was released a few months later on January 23, 1943, and was almost shot simultaneously at Warner Bros., from May 25 until August 3. Over the years, “Casablanca” gained a more popular following than “Now, Voyager” did; in 1998, a novel entitled “As Times Goes By,” written by Michael Walsh for Warner Books, follows the characters of Rick, Ilsa, Victor (Paul Henreid), Sam, and Louis (Claude Rains) after they left Casablanca.

Starmaker

When originally scheduled to direct “Now, Voyager,” filmmaker Edmund Goulding wrote a treatment for the film, but he fell ill and was unable to direct the film. Michael Curtiz then was assigned as director, as soon as he had finished shooting another Wallis production called “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942) with James Cagney. Still, from the very start, it became clear that Curtiz and Bette Davis couldn’t get along. Finally, producer Hal B. Wallis decided to go with a new director, London-born Irving Rapper. “He was a pleasant, amusing Englishman. He liked Bette, and she liked him,” Wallis recalled in “Starmaker,” his 1989 mémoires . Irving Rapper was a vocal coach, dialogue director, and assistant director in the 1930s who, prior to “Now, Voyager,” had directed only three features, including “One Foot in Heaven” (1941) starring Fredric March and Martha Scott, and “The Gay Sisters” (1942) with Barbara Stanwyck. In the end, just like Bette Davis, he was not the first choice by all means, but he turned out to be the right one.

Four years later, Irving Rapper and his three leading actors from “Now, Voyager”—Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains (Davis’ favorite co-star)—were reunited with the drama “Deception,” also made at Warner Bros. (this one without Hal B. Wallis). In 1964, Paul Henreid directed Bette Davis (playing twin sisters) in the crime drama “Dead Ringer,” with his daughter Monika Henreid playing a supporting role.

Irving Rapper and Bette Davis later worked together again in “The Corn Is Green” and “Another Man’s Posion’ (1951). “Irving has directed some of my best pictures,” she said in later interviews.

Now Voyager 05 poster

Author Olive Higgins Prouty wrote four novels about the wealthy Vale family in Boston (“Now, Voyager” being the third). She sold the “Voyager” rights to Wallis for $35,000 in October 1941, and made several suggestions. She preferred Technicolor to be used, with the flashbacks shown in subdued colors as if seen through a veil, and she had laid down a scheme for particular sequences. Wallis decided to go ahead and ignore them completely, but after she had seen the film in her New England home with twenty-five friends, ‘all of them applauded,’ Wallis wrote in his autobiography. She wrote him a letter, saying that ‘the plot follows very closely that of my book and the personalities of the various characters have been carefully observed and preserved.’

Celluloid Muse

Finally, film director Irving Rapper, born in 1898 in London, passed away at age 101 in 1999 in Woodland Hills, California, of natural causes. Never really in the spotlights, there’s not too much written about him. Authors Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg did include him in their interview book “The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak” (1969), a collection of fifteen interviews with film directors who spent most of their careers working in Hollywood. In their introduction of the Irving Rapper interview, they describe his whereabouts at the time of the interview: ‘Irving Rapper’s apartment is set high in a glistening white building in the very heart of Hollywood. Only a stone’s throw from Hollywood Boulevard, with its seedy spangle of light-signs,  its driven restless sixties people, and its ever-skulking hustlers, Rapper inhabits a seemingly sealed-off forties world. As so often in Hollywood, fantasy and reality seem one, so that as you enter the hall, where a super-efficient blonde announces your arrival directly from the reception desk to the host’s telephone, you could easily be in a scene from a vintage Bette Davis picture, and you half expect to see her charge stormily at any moment through the glass window doors, ready for an argument with David Brian or Bruce Bennett—those lost figures of Hollywood’s past. Chez Rapper, the atmosphere of that past exists. Comfortably plump and relaxed, with an elegant and cultivated personality, he is utterly unlike the brisk new generation of grey-suited, fiercely efficient Hollywood men. (…) Like so many Hollywood talents, he has been put firmly—and one hopes only temporarily—on the shelf by the newest generation, but looking round his apartment, you see the compensations: Chinese lampstands ‘fit for a museum,” magnificent paintings crowded tightly up of a wall, a louvered cocktail recess, an atmosphere of spacious, glossy luxury. And beyond the great windows and the penthouse balcony, the whispering traffic, the horn-bleeps and the diamond shine of an ocean of lights: Los Angeles.’

Just for the record, even though “Now, Voyager” isn’t mentioned in AFI’s list of 100 Greatest American Films of All Time, the film ranks at #23 in AFI’s 100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time, while Bette Davis’ closing line, ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon… we have the stars!’ is at #46 in AFI’s Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time. In 2007, “Now, Voyager” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.’

“Now, Voyager” (1942, trailer)

NOW, VOYAGER (1942) DIR Irving Rapper PROD Hal B. Wallis SCR Casey Robinson (novel ‘Now, Voyager’ [1941] by Olive Higgins Prouty) CAM Sol Polito MUS Max Steiner ED Warren Low CAST Bette Davis ( Charlotte Vale ), Paul Henreid ( Jerry Durrance ), Claude Rains ( Doctor Jaquith ), Gladys Cooper ( Mrs. Vale ), Bonita Granville ( June Vale ), John Loder ( Elliott Livingston ), Ilka Chase ( Lisa Vale ), Mary Wickes ( Dora Pickford ), Janis Wilson ( Tina Durrance )

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Music and Mildred Pierce , 1945 and 2011

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Guido Heldt, Music and Mildred Pierce , 1945 and 2011, Screen , Volume 54, Issue 3, Autumn 2013, Pages 403–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjt034

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Remakes of classic texts are an integral part of today's film and television landscape, but ‘remake’ can mean very different things. At one end of the scale is a detailed recreation such as Gus van Sant's Psycho (1998), at the other end, for example, sits Todd Haynes's HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), which seems related to the 1945 film mainly ex negativo , instead harking back to James M. Cain's 1941 novel. This differentiation also applies to the music in the two adaptations: Max Steiner's 1945 score, a classic example of studio-era Hollywood scoring, contrasts strongly with the calm simplicity of Carter Burwell's original music and the more elaborate use of preexisting music in the television series.

But things are not quite so simple. The role of excess in relation to Mildred Pierce 's classic status has been covered in previous scholarship, but the relationship between classicism and excess is also, though from a slightly different angle, applicable to Steiner's music. And while the music used in the series is superficially different, at points one can hear in it echoes of Steiner's practices that reflect the series' complex relationship to its famous precursor.

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) epitomizes classical Hollywood cinema (and its scholarship), as does Steiner's score, which has been discussed in film music scholarship variously to explain the use of leitmotifs in classical Hollywood practice, to consider the relationship between music and film form, to demonstrate the influence of Wagnerian codes, and as a test case for film music pedagogy. 1 Steiner was typical of his generation of Hollywood composers: like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin or Hans J. Salter (or the slightly younger Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa), he was an immigrant from Europe. He was descended from a Viennese theatrical family, classically trained, the godson of Richard Strauss, and experienced in opera and popular music theatre. Employed at RKO and Warner Bros. from the 1930s to the 1950s, Steiner was instrumental in establishing the style of Hollywood scoring on the art-music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose richness of means was used to fulfil a wide range of filmic functions and to move fluidly between moods, and between grand gestures and ‘unheard melodies’, making music in sound film as important and almost as pervasive as it had been in silent cinema. 2

Most of Steiner's music in Mildred Pierce is based on five leitmotifs that pervade the film: for Mildred (Joan Crawford), for her business success, her husband Bert (Bruce Bennett), their daughters Veda and Kay (Ann Blyth and Jo Ann Marlowe), and for Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). 3 The themes are centred on Mildred and those with whom she has intense personal relationships; the fact that Wally Fay (Jack Carson), for example, lacks a theme classifies him as secondary. All of the themes are straightforwardly diatonic, 4 and their juxtaposition exploits traditional harmonic procedures. Those used for Bert, the daughters and Mildred's success are introduced in G major, while Mildred's personal theme we first hear in D-flat major, at the greatest possible distance, indicating the tragic gulf between the Mildred we encounter at the start of the film and her former professional and family life. 5 While cut from the same stylistic cloth, the themes are still differentiated: Mildred's, with its regular phrase structure and distinctive figures, is the most memorable, confirming her place at the centre of the film, while Bert's theme, with its hesitant neighbour-note vacillation and harmonically open downward sequence, sets him apart from her. The contrast could be described as musical counter-gendering; Eva Rieger has shown that in terms of Wagnerian musical codes, Mildred's theme is as typically ‘male’ as Bert's is ‘female’. 6

Within the framework of that leitmotif system, the music does what music typically does in 1940s Hollywood – it smoothes over discontinuities of filmic narration and marks emotionally charged passages, while variations of themes fit them to the scene's or character's particular mood, ‘mickey-mousing’ 7 heightens movements and action, and ‘stingers’ 8 pick out individual gestures. All in all, the music illustrates the unwritten conventions of classical Hollywood scoring outlined by Claudia Gorbman, conventions that aim to ensure that the music is not just gratuitous but functional, that it ‘fits’, and is justified by clear relationships with other filmic elements. 9 This is consistent with the notion of classical Hollywood style as an ‘excessively obvious cinema’, a cinema defined by the concealment of artifice and a focus on story comprehensibility. 10

But Hollywood may be not quite as straightforward, as Mildred Pierce and its music demonstrate. The distinction between the film noir elements of the framing narrative around Monte's murder and the melodrama elements of the embedded story of Mildred's past could be understood as aiding comprehensibility, by clarifying the flashback structure and guiding audience understanding of story levels and their social implications. But the gain in narrative clarity is paid for by the foregrounding of artifice. The switching between genre styles shows up film style as something that is not natural, but a conscious choice. This has led Pam Cook to question the film's classical status: ‘“classic” film is generally characterised by the dominance of a metadiscourse, which represents the Truth’, while the rift through Mildred Pierce ‘is a mark of excess’ 11 – the term also used by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson to describe Hollywood classicism as ‘excessively obvious’. Although Cook's excess is defined in Lacanian terms, the parallel may be no accident. To frame the melodrama with a crime narrative that asserts ‘patriarchal metadiscourse’, embodied by the all-knowing Inspector Peterson (Moroni Olsen), explodes the film's unity from within. 12 The excessive obviousness of classical Hollywood narration is a different proposition – centripetal, not centrifugal. Yet unintended consequences loom: to make something over-obvious risks making it strange, which is the dialectical twist at the heart of Hollywood classicism.

say, Mildred Pierce , with Max Steiner's lush and insistent score full of dramatic, illustrative orchestral coloration. What sheer artifice this would appear to the viewer! … What excess : every mood and action rendered hyperexplicit by a Wagnerian rush of tonality and rhythm! 13

The pervasiveness of classical Hollywood scoring itself can seem excessive, with leitmotifs wrapping themselves like second skins around their characters, but skins that turn the characters inside out, making us almost constantly privy to their inner states.

Excessive obviousness also characterizes Steiner's focus on detail. When Wally Fay realizes that something is wrong, and tries to get into the beach-house bedroom from which Mildred has fled, the images take on full noir mode, with sharp contrasts, huge shadows and acute camera angles. But the additional emphasis of Steiner's music, mickey-mousing each of Wally's frantic steps, somehow goes beyond drama and gives the scene a cartoonish feel (while not quite suspending the suspense). That may be an attempt to show that ‘Wally is basically a comic character who has been duped by Mildred’ and ‘now looks a bit of a fool as he crashes about the house’. 14 But even as conscious characterization, the music points out how fine the line is between emphasis and parody. A similar effect is achieved when Mildred and Monte are flirting at his beach house. Monte in one smooth move slips off Mildred's bathrobe as she passes, and Steiner singles out the moment with a harp glissando – the first music in the scene. Deliberately unignorable, it too is a punctuating effect one could easily imagine in a cartoon, and while this might fit the light-heartedness of the situation and Monte's slickness, it is also close to caricature – caricature not just of character and mood, but of the film style that presents them to us.

Hyperexplicitness also affects the absence of music. Steiner's leitmotifs cross the borderline between frame and flashback, but they do not make it into the police station. Mildred's arrival at the station is marked by timpani rolls and a minor-mode fanfare (for a shot of the floor emblem ‘Hall of Justice – Los Angeles’) that suggests a rather intimidating image of authority. But the music slowly fades as she enters, and the scene in the station is accompanied only by the sounds of office technology, rustling paper and a ticking clock, made ominous by reverb. In the inspector's office, even that sonic atmosphere ceases; the locus of patriarchal control is strictly neutral. 15 But while that may be meant to endow Peterson with an authority beyond the emotional overcharge of much of the rest of the film, it cuts off his sphere so radically from its context that it becomes uncanny. The gulf between the voice of authority and the protagonists becomes too wide to make the authority reassuring.

This hyperexplicitness does not really accord with the idea of concealment of artifice as a hallmark of Hollywood classicism, but sometimes artifice is used even more openly. Monte Beragon's theme is the only one in Mildred Pierce that crosses the diegetic/nondiegetic borderline, coming first from his record player before moving into the underscore. This nicely characterizes Monte as someone who borrows music to seduce Mildred (just as he will later take her money). The smooth, easy-listening arrangement, its neat choreography of the scene, even the circling of the needle in the end groove once Monte has succeeded in his seduction, illustrating the sordidness of his ploy, all help with that characterization. 16 But the music goes beyond functionality, because Monte borrows it from Steiner: Monte's record is based on the main theme from Steiner's score for Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), which had been marketed separately as the song ‘It Can't Be Wrong’ (with lyrics by Kim Gannon). Its second life as a song makes it plausible as preexisting music employed by Monte, but the self-referential twist – obvious to a contemporary audience, given that the films were only three years apart – is one of those instances in which Hollywood does not ‘conceal its artifice’ at all, but lifts the curtain to show us the inner workings of film and of the culture industry.

In an age of sequels, prequels, spinoffs and remakes, the workings of the culture industry also underpin Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce miniseries for HBO. Haynes had made his name with period pieces recreating worlds and models with a hyper-precision that was a distancing strategy in itself, such as Far from Heaven (2002), his homage to Douglas Sirk, which has been described as a ‘better-than-the-original’ copy, a simulacrum in Umberto Eco's sense. 17 A television miniseries, however, required a different kind of storytelling, and the echoes of the 1930s depression in the post-2008 banking crisis may have suggested a more overt distancing move, with a ‘return’ to Cain's novel. The series replaces the flashback structure of the film with a simple chronological narrative that patiently pursues Mildred's rise and fall, seemingly ignoring its cinematic predecessor. As in Far from Heaven , Haynes creates a gleaming surface that evokes 1930s California as an image frozen in picturesqueness. While superficially very different from Steiner's, the music of the series creates its own strangeness, one that lies not in hyper-explicitness but in a vagueness that belies the simplicity of the series' narrative strategy.

The music consists of three elements: popular 1930s songs and dance music, either in original recordings or in modern pastiche performances; Carter Burwell's original music; and classical music played or sung by Veda. It seems like an obvious division of labour, but the strangeness is in the detail. One would expect the period music to be employed diegetically, to furnish the storyworld, but it nearly always lacks a plausible diegetic source, coming and going for no clear reason; and while it does impart a sense of place and time, its nondiegetic position places it at a remove from the world we know it belongs to. The result is an oddly generalized period flavour, which fits the idea that the series evokes rather than recreates its world. If there is rhyme and reason to the period tunes, it is that they sometimes seem to comment via their lyrics (which are sometimes, but not always, sung). When, for example, Episode 2 shows Mildred (Kate Winslet) drive Bert (Brían F. O'Byrne) ‘home’ (that is, to his lover Mrs Biederhoff), we hear ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’, which might be applied to the breakdown of their marriage and to Mildred's new life as a single mother. The next day, at the cafe where she works, we hear ‘Stardust’. Mildred is moving towards economic independence, and the (textless) song sings for her ‘Love is now the stardust of yesterday’; she has other priorities now. When she is planning her own cafe, we hear ‘Moonglow’, whose (unsung) lyrics say ‘And I keep on prayin’ “Oh Lord, please let this last!”'. ‘Moonglow’ also accompanies Mildred and Monty's (Guy Pearce) road trip to Santa Barbara, alluding to Mildred's hopes for personal happiness. When, in Episode 3, cracks in their relationship begin to appear, Monty and Mildred are underscored by ‘Happy Go Lucky You and Broken Hearted Me’ – ‘Gone is the romance and broken the vow / We used to be sweethearts but what are we now? / Happy-go-lucky you and broken-hearted me’ – aptly characterizing the two and foreshadowing the fate of their relationship. The lyrics are sufficiently generic and the allusions sufficiently vague not to be obtrusive. The period music floats through the series, occasionally making contact, but never too firmly. It provides general historical furnishing, but also toys with being a gently commenting voice; it is neither completely one thing nor the other.

Burwell's original music is just as difficult to pin down. From the theme music with its calm and simple diatonicism onwards, it seems to be a disavowal of Steiner's grand gestures. This continues through a range of cues that rarely go beyond calmness and simplicity, an equivalent to the patient storytelling. Over time, the range of means expands, and the music becomes more dramatic, yet strong gestures and unambiguous semiotic markers remain rare. 18 But while superficially different to Steiner's music, it is not too difficult to describe Burwell's cues in related terms. Burwell also uses a system of repeated, varied and interwoven musical units similar to the classic leitmotifs, and he also deploys a traditional language clearly set apart from the period music. His music is less a radical alternative to Steiner's than an out-of-focus after-image.

This impression also applies to the music's storyworld attachment. Most of the original music is associated with Mildred. As with the period music, the strategy is unostentatious but, at least to begin with, the original music primarily accompanies moments in which Mildred is thrown back on herself – when she is alone, waiting, thinking, watching herself in a mirror, walking on her way to building her new life. Increasingly the music also underscores more dramatic moments, for example when she is beating Veda, when Ray is dying, or at Ray's funeral. But almost all the scenes underscored with Burwell's music are linked to Mildred's inner life. It is an entire leitmotif system just for her, placing Mildred even more firmly at the centre of the series than her predecessor in the film. Yet this is not much of a system: the different motifs are too similar (much of the material is indeed derived from the theme music), and with a few exceptions there is no clear principle of applying motifs to situations; the result is another distorted echo of traditional Hollywood practice.

The third musical strand dispenses with such vagueness and moves music right into the diegesis. In Curtiz's film, Veda's trajectory from budding pianist to successful singer is almost excised; all that is left of her singing career is ‘The Oceana Roll’ that she sings at Wally's club. The series, however, makes Veda's music central, providing a counterweight to the original music's focus on Mildred and juxtaposing the women. While Burwell's music for Mildred is, however vaguely, linked to her interiority, Veda's music, like her life, is all performance. She even uses it for expression by proxy: When, in Episode 3, she is railing against her mother, she bashes out the Can-Can from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld on their old upright piano – ‘cheap’ music as a slap in the face of the mother Veda has accused of being cheap.

Veda's music culminates with ‘the climax of Mildred's life’, 19 the grand concert in Episode 5. As in the novel, the series features operatic showpieces in the concert, but changes the selection, perhaps to introduce arias more familiar to a modern audience. Of the arias mentioned by Cain, only ‘Caro nome’ from Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) is retained. 20 Added are ‘Casta diva’ from Bellini's Norma (1831), ‘Quia la voce sua suave’ from Bellini's I Puritani (1835), and the second aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart's Magic Flute (1791). As with the period music, one can hear allusions. ‘Casta diva’, calling on the goddess to ‘scatter peace over the earth’, is introduced with a long advance displacement for Mildred watching Veda sleep in her house, before arriving at the concert: is the narration voicing Mildred's hopes for her relationship with Veda, or is Veda offering peace? With the Mozart, Veda alludes to another fraught mother–daughter relationship, albeit casting herself as the enraged mother, symbolically knotting their relationship yet more, before in ‘Quia la voce’ she sings of a lover who ‘swore to be faithful … and then cruelly fled from me’, which is easily applicable to Monty betraying Mildred with Veda, who may be giving her mother a hint.

The series follows Cain's novel again by using ‘I'm Always Chasing Rainbows’ as Veda's encore. It is the one piece of period music that, after its nondiegetic use in Episode 2, crosses over into the diegesis, and it is period music that also crosses between musical worlds: an adaptation of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu op. 66 links Veda's art music and the popular music of Mildred's world. But it is just another performance by Veda playing to her mother while hinting, via the lyrics, that Mildred's ‘schemes are just like all my dreams / Ending in the sky’. In Veda's music, the strategy of vague allusions in the period music enters the diegesis and becomes a weapon. Like Monte in the 1945 film, she uses music as a means to an end, and in the final episode her music seems to overwhelm the calm nondiegetic underscore. Balance is only restored when Mildred, having discovered the betrayal, almost strangles Veda, and Veda's final attempt to assert herself through singing and bashing at the piano produces only incoherent noise, symbolizing the final breakdown of their relationship through the collapse of her music. The last musical word belongs to the reappearance of ‘I'm Always Chasing Rainbows’ for the credits, ending the series with a wistfulness as far from Steiner's emphatic orchestral ending as possible.

There is no simple conclusion. As with any classical style, that of studio-era Hollywood is most interesting, and perhaps aesthetically most fruitful, in its inconsistencies and contradictions, and Mildred Pierce exemplifies this well. Its remake on the other hand, even if it aims to avoid rather than imitate its precursor, needs to factor it in as a point of reference. The careful path that the music for Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce steers between radical alternative and faint echo shows how cleverly that can be done.

Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), pp. 70–98; Justin M. London, ‘Leitmotifs and musical reference in the classical film score’, in James Buhler, Caryl Flinn and David Neumeyer (eds), Music and Cinema (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), pp. 85–96; James Buhler, David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer, Hearing the Movies. Music and Sound in Film History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 146–51; Eva Rieger, ‘Wagner's influence on gender roles in early Hollywood film’, in Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Wagner and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 131–51; David Neumeyer, ‘Film music analysis and pedagogy’, Indiana Theory Review , no. 11 (1990), pp. 1–28.

For Steiner's influence see, for example, Mark Slobin, ‘The Steiner superculture’, in Slobin (ed.), Global Soundtracks. Worlds of Film Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), pp. 3–35.

See London, ‘Leitmotifs and musical reference’, pp. 92–93, for the question of whether it is just Veda's or Veda's and Kay's theme.

Each uses only the pitch classes of a major (or minor) scale, no complicating chromatics.

See Neumeyer, ‘Film music analysis and pedagogy’, pp. 20–23 for more details of Steiner's harmonic procedures in Mildred Pierce .

Rieger, ‘Wagner's influence on gender roles’, p. 145. The differentiation is borne out by its use: the row that leads to the break-up of Mildred and Bert is not underscored; Bert's theme only comes in when she throws him out. Later, he interrupts Monte and Mildred in the restaurant, but the scene is scored with fragments of Monte's theme (which Bert interrupts just as noticeably as he does the lovers' kiss); Bert's music starts when he says that Mildred can have the divorce, when once again he gives in.

The close synchronization of musical movement and onscreen movement. Typical in cartoons, the technique was often used in live-action Hollywood scores as well, especially by Steiner.

A short, sharp musical accent.

See Gorbman, Unheard Melodies , p. 73.

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 3.

Pam Cook, ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce ’, in Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 33.

Gorbman, Unheard Melodies , p. 1.

Buhler, Neumeyer and Deemer, Hearing the Movies , p. 225.

Only with the revelation of Veda as the murderer does music enter Peterson's office, after the puzzle of the crime part of the film has been solved.

Key points of the musical choreography are: the bridge ends after smooth-talking Monte pretends to be tongue-tied in Mildred's presence; the refrain repeat begins just when he says ‘You take my breath away’ and leans forward; the melody reaches its climax when Mildred says that he makes her feel warm; and the song ends precisely with their kiss.

John Gill, Far from Heaven (London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI Publishing, 2011), p. 24.

The most obvious exception is a motif introduced when Mildred learns of Ray's (Quinn McColgan) illness, built round a pastiche-baroque chord sequence that is a historical signifier of anguish, and that attaches itself to moments of loss in Mildred's life.

James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (London: Phoenix, 2002), p. 262.

The other arias in the novel are ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Rossini's The Barber of Seville (1816), ‘Il dolce suono’ from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and ‘Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark’ from Henry Bishop's The Comedy of Errors (1819); Veda ends the concert with lighter pieces.

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mildred pierce music now voyager

The Man Who Made Film Music

All this changed in 1932, when David O. Selznick, then the head of production at RKO, asked Max Steiner, a Viennese émigré who was in charge of the studio’s music department, to write an original score for Gregory La Cava’s Symphony of Six Million . “The entire picture,” Selznick decreed, “is to be accompanied by a symphonic underscoring.” Thus the first traditional film “score” was born. A year later, Steiner’s bosses, fearing that the primitive special effects in King Kong would strike audiences as laughable, ordered him to underscore the film to heighten its dramatic effect.

Steiner was not a composer by training—he had previously worked as a musical-comedy and operetta conductor and orchestrator on Broadway and in Vienna—but the success of King Kong and his score transformed American film music. More than that of any other composer, his style, a rich, boldly colored mixture of Liszt, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, would become the lingua franca of studio-system film scoring. By the time of his death in 1971, Steiner had scored some 300-odd feature films, including Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), John Ford’s The Informer (1935), John Huston’s Key Largo and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (both 1948), Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager (1942), Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), and—most famously—Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939).

Along the way, he won three Oscars, received 24 nominations, and even wrote a pop-music hit, the theme music for Delmer Daves’s A Summer Place (1959). Jerry Goldsmith summed up the immense impact of his vast body of work when he remarked in 1993 that “the techniques developed by Steiner for [ King Kong ] are basically the same techniques we use today.” 1

Yet Steiner, admired though he was and is by his fellow professionals, was never treated with comparable respect outside Hollywood. The only film composers of the period who were taken at all seriously by American classical-music critics were Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Miklós Rózsa, both of whom had previously written for the concert hall and (in Korngold’s case) the opera house. Steiner, by contrast, was dismissed as a Broadway pit man turned purveyor of Hollywood schlock, and on the rare occasions when he conducted concerts of film music, the notices ranged from indifferent to brutal.

Typical was Douglas Watt ’s 1943 New York Daily News review of Steiner’s lone guest appearance with the New York Philharmonic, at which he conducted excerpts from Gone with the Wind , The Informer , and Now, Voyager . The players treated him with contemptuous indifference at the single 90-minute rehearsal he was granted, and Watt’s review was scarcely more friendly: “The technicolored music spread from the stage like a chemical fog, filling the mind with caressing sound and having a mild narcotic effect….Taken from their film context, the works were amorphous and had little meaning.”

It was not until 1973, when RCA began releasing a series of film-music albums in which Steiner’s work figured prominently, that he began at last to receive his critical due. Three years later, John Williams’s Star Wars score triggered a general revival of interest in symphonic film music that continues to this day. The scores for such popular action films as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989, music by Danny Elfman) and The Dark Knight (2008, music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) bear the unmistakable stamp of Steiner, whom Elfman calls “the godfather of all film music.” 2

It is thus surprising that Steiner has only now become the subject of a full-length biography: Steven C. Smith’s Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer . It is both thorough and readable, an estimable effort by a journalist and documentary producer who has a solid grasp of the ins and outs of film scoring (his previous book A Heart at Fire’s Center , is a biography of Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of all film composers). As Smith makes clear, Steiner was the most significant composer in the history of American film music—but how good a composer was he? That is a very different question indeed.

_____________

Born in Vienna in 1888, Steiner made his conducting debut at the age of 11, composed an operetta of his own in 1907 (albeit with only modest success), and moved to London the following year, setting up shop as a theater conductor and orchestrator. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1914 to avoid being interned as an enemy alien and spent the next decade and a half on Broadway, conducting such shows as the Gershwins’ Lady Be Good (1924), which starred Fred and Adele Astaire.

Late in 1929, Steiner moved to Hollywood and went to work for RKO and, later, Warner Bros. He scored his first film in 1930—the first time that he had ever written symphonic-style music—and in 1931 alone he worked on two dozen films. While few of them were distinguished, he moved closer to formulating his mature idiom with each project, taking a giant step forward with Symphony of Six Million . In realizing Selznick’s music-related instructions, Steiner employed a technique invented by Richard Wagner, building his score out of short melodic fragments known as “leitmotifs” that are associated with specific characters and dramatic themes in the film. He once went so far as to argue that “if Wagner had lived in our times, he would have been our top film composer.”

Steiner’s use of leitmotifs was both skillful and, at its best, dramatically insightful, as can be heard in his score for Howard Hawks’s 1946 screen version of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep . Hawks turned the book into a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Accordingly, Steiner based his score on a sardonic-sounding leitmotif associated with Bogart, steering clear of overt romanticism until halfway through the film, when Philip Marlowe (played by Bogart) realizes that he has fallen in love with Bacall’s character, marking the moment with a Viennese-style waltz that in context sounds not incongruous but appropriate. Steiner’s music emphasizes the witty, sexually suggestive byplay between the two stars, and its tone is altogether compatible with Hawks’s transformation of Chandler’s hard-boiled mystery into what David Thomson has called “a screwball love story.”

A lifelong workaholic who had no professional ambitions outside of film scoring—he never wrote any concert music—Steiner’s scores grew increasingly elaborate as he refined his craft. But Steiner’s King Kong score, while it is less interesting than his music of the ’40s and ’50s, is all of a piece with his later work. It makes use of the same techniques, identifying the characters with leitmotifs and intensifying the emotional impact of the performances of the actors who play them—as well as that of the mechanical ape who is the film’s title character. Without Steiner’s soaring music, King Kong’s passion for Fay Wray would almost certainly have struck contemporary audiences as preposterous. Instead, his underscoring makes the ape’s feelings believable.

What is equally striking about the King Kong score is the extreme conservatism of its musical language. It is as if modernism had never happened: Most of King Kong might just as well have been written in the late 19th century. Nor does it contain any distinctively American musical features. Though Steiner spent a decade and a half on Broadway and would later work on several of Fred Astaire’s films, his musical sensibility was wholly European. Even when he based a score on a popular song, as he did with Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca , he treated it like an operatic love theme.

Steiner was also known for a practice referred to by musicians as “Mickey-mousing,” a nod to the way in which the scores for Walt Disney’s early cartoons echoed with exaggerated fidelity the movements of the animated characters on screen. A case in point is the leitmotif associated with Philip Carey, the character played by Leslie Howard in John Cromwell’s 1934 screen version of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage . Carey has a club foot, and his leitmotif is an endlessly repeated pair of chords that imitate his limp so precisely as to sound comical to modern ears.

Aaron Copland, who took film music seriously enough to score several feature films, described the resulting effect as “very obvious and…vulgarizing.” Steiner himself was proud of it. “It fits the picture,” he claimed. “The regular symphonic writers are unwilling to follow the [novel] in this matter, and so are unwilling to do this work. But there is a unity in my music, exactly similar to the unity in Wagner’s operas.”

But Copland was right, and Steiner’s limitations as a composer were thrown into still higher relief when Erich Wolfgang Korngold came to Hollywood in 1935. Unlike Steiner, Korngold had been a classical pro-digy and a technical virtuoso who worked in a far more sophisticated musical idiom identical to that of his operas. Steiner’s genius, by contrast, was for pure melody—Korngold never wrote anything as instantaneously memorable as the principal themes for Gone with the Wind or Now, Voyager .

In any case, Steiner got there first, and his lush music was a perfect match for the romantic melodramas that became his trademark, especially the ones starring Bette Davis, who was properly appreciative of his contribution to her work (she called him “my beautiful Max Steiner”).

Nowhere, though, did he make more telling use of this idiom than in Gone with the Wind , whose score, filled at Selznick’s insistence with period tunes like “Dixie” and “Old Folks at Home,” evokes with uncanny, at times unsettling fidelity the “lost-cause” nostalgia for the Old South that permeates Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel. While it is by no means Steiner’s finest score, it is his best-loved one and an achievement of which he was justly proud, and he was heartbroken when it failed to win an Oscar for the best original score of 1939 (the prize went instead to The Wizard of Oz ).

Over time, Steiner’s work shed much of its naiveté and grew both subtler and tougher. By the late ’40s, he was writing arrestingly dramatic scores in which he drew on a wider (if never challenging) harmonic vocabulary that was more closely suited to the sterner postwar American temper. But film music was about to undergo an even more radical transformation at the hands of American-born composers who, like Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith, were not only conversant with jazz and popular music but also integrated the language of musical modernism into their styles. The Steiner-Korngold idiom sounded quaint by contrast, and younger directors such as Martin Scorsese ultimately found it so unsympathetic that they often “scored” their films not with purpose-written orchestral music but with pop and rock records that served the same mood-setting purpose.

Nevertheless, the symphonic score never went away, and Star Wars introduced a new generation of enthusiastic listeners to its old-fashioned charms. At the same time, concertgoers who disliked avant-garde classical music instead gravitated toward the film scores that their parents had loved, and it has become common in recent years for major symphony orchestras to program such music.

It stands to reason that Steiner should have profited less from this revival than Korngold, Rózsa, and Bernard Herrmann, whose work is rightly held in higher esteem. Still, the best of his scores remain both engaging and superbly listenable, and they will always be central to the continuing appeal of the now-classic films on which he worked. It is impossible to think of Gone with the Wind , Casablanca , or Now, Voyager without recalling their generous, open-hearted music—nor is it possible to imagine film music itself without acknowledging the pioneering innovations of its first important practitioner.

1 He also wrote what may be the single best-known piece of golden-age film music, the fanfare-like sequence of ascending trumpet triplets heard at the beginning of nearly every Warner Bros. film of the studio-system era. 2 The best single-CD introduction to Steiner’s music is Now, Voyager: The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner (RCA), recorded in 1973 by Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic, which contains suites compiled by Gerhardt from 10 films scored by Steiner, including The Big Sleep , The Informer , The Fountainhead , and King Kong .

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Mildred Pierce

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Release Date: May 3, 2011

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  • Mildred Pierce (2011) [Miniseries]
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Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

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Broadway Legend Joined: 6/6/04

#0 Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

You can only rent one tonight. Which one would it be?

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Broadway Legend Joined: 8/16/04

#1 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Definitely Mildred. "Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young."

Matt_G Profile Photo

Broadway Legend Joined: 5/1/04

#2 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

I just saw PIERCE last week, so I'll go with the other. You really can't go wrong with an old Bette Davis film.

#3 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Actually, I'm more in the mood for Dark Victory ... Nothing can hurt us now. What we have can't be destroyed. That's our victory - our victory over the dark. It is a victory because we're not afraid.

MargoChanning Profile

Broadway Legend Joined: 4/5/04

#4 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Well, they're both sitting on the shelves of my video collection in my home office -- if I were going to run back and grab one right now it would probably be "Now Voyager" (though I'm more in the mood for "The Star" or "Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte" -- also back on those shelves somewhere).

#5 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Or "Jezebel." I love the scene where she is singing with the children. Her acting is so good there.

#6 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

I have "All About Eve" and "Baby Jane" on DVD.

#7 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Why oh WHY does nobody ever mention the best Bette Davis film of all time, WICKED STEPMOTHER?!

#8 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Is that post stroke? Did you love Jan Hooks as post stroke Bette?

#9 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

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Broadway Legend Joined: 5/16/03

#10 re: Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

Now Voyager- much more unreal & magical!!!

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Now, Voyager

Irving Rapper

Review by Briallen Hopper

Posted on 17 May 2012

Source Warner Bros. DVD

Reviews Now, Voyager by Matt

Categories Favorites: Transformations

I have loved Now, Voyager for so long now, and it is always such solace to be enveloped by it. I’ll never forget seeing it on the big screen six years ago in London. The red velvet curtains swept aside, the music swelled, the prow of an ocean liner cut through a frothy sea, and hundreds of women and gay men reached for their Kleenex in unison.

Thanks to the seductive string section stylings of Max Steiner and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Now, Voyager is a perfect melodrama. It’s also a dieter’s and drag queen’s dream—a film in which you can lose your eyebrows and some weight, don a pompadour and a corsage, and find yourself.

As befits a tale with a Walt Whitman title, self-transformation in Now, Voyager is fully embodied. Salvation requires sex, altered flesh, and literal voyages. And freedom in this film is defined through food and fat, and especially through women controlling their own fat and each other’s. Our heroine Charlotte Vale breaks free from her detestable mother, who “doesn’t believe in diets,” by dieting; she triumphantly quells her bullying niece by calling her “Roly-Poly”; and she proves her own suitability for motherhood by persuading her anorexic future foster-daughter to eat ice cream.

But despite its status as the quintessential melodrama and makeover/eating-disorder movie, Now, Voyager exceeds definitions. It is not so much the story of a single makeover as it is a series of metamorphoses, and it defies genres by allowing its heroine, in two short hours, to play nearly every mythic women’s role, whether tragic, comic, grotesque, or mundane. Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale embodies the classic heroines Galatea, Cordelia, Cinderella, and Camille; the clichés of the Impatient Virgin, the Woman in Love with her Analyst, and the Other Woman; the primal archetypes of Daughter, Sister, Aunt, and Mother (this is a highly matriarchal cinematic world); and the glowing advertising images of the Outdoorswoman, the Hostess with the Mostess, and the Most Popular Woman on Board. And she manages all this while at all times being (at least technically) that other cliché, the Old Maid.

Though it was no doubt made for unhappily married middle-aged housewives (as all Hollywood melodramas allegedly were), Now, Voyager is not about them, at least not in the way that Stella Dallas or Mildred Pierce or Magnificent Obsession or Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows are about them. Unlike these movies, Now, Voyager is not a fantasy fulfillment of a thirty- or forty-ish woman’s need for a second act after marriage and children have somehow failed to satisfy. Instead it is a fantasy about what can happen in one’s thirties when the first act never materializes.

What can happen, in brief, is that you can steam up some parked cars on a boat in a flashback a la Kate Winslet in Titanic ; meet a charming shrink (Claude Rains) with whom you have great chemistry; check yourself into his delightful mental hospital; go on a diet; borrow some hot clothes; go on a vacay to Brazil and hook up with a sexy and inexplicably Austrian-accented married architect named Jerry (Paul Henreid); feel alive for the first time; nobly and passionately renounce Jerry because he can never get a divorce because he doesn’t want to lose custody of his children; feel unafraid for the first time; get engaged to a boring Bostonian WASP just because; get bored and break it off; inherit a million dollars from the mother you hated; check yourself back into the mental hospital for a minute and banter with Claude Rains some more; make friends with a young patient at the mental hospital who happens to be your architect ex’s adorable anorexic daughter Tina; unofficially adopt your architect ex’s adorable anorexic daughter Tina (it turns out she hates her bio-mom, and conveniently the feeling is mutual); and spend the rest of your life bouncing energetically around your mansion with your friends and your kid, parenting, partying, playing loud music, roasting hot dogs in the fireplaces, flirting with your former shrink, and using your money and know-how to help shape mental health care policy.

Very occasionally, say in the final minutes of your film, you may find yourself floating into a delicious moment of sky-high melodrama with your architect ex, who likes to light two cigarettes in his mouth at once and then soulfully pass one to you. By the transitive property, it will be like your lips are touching. It will be a thrill that you will relive and live off of for years.

Now, Voyager ’s ultimate lines - “But are you happy, Charlotte?” “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars” - are just a fancier way of saying “Nobody’s perfect,” which is the gay man’s historic unanswerable answer to the straight happy ending. The 1990s version of this consolation-prize benediction, improbably voiced by Jack Nicholson, is “What if this is as good as it gets?” All these lines are strong statements about the irrelevance of a clichéd straight happiness, or straight sadness.

Jerry, oblivious straight man that he is, tries to tell Charlotte that she should want “some man who’ll make you happy,” but Charlotte, a self-described “sentimental fool,” ridicules this notion as “the most conventional, pretentious, pious speech I’ve ever heard in my life!” What Charlotte really wants is not the marriage plot but an end to the emotional exclusion she experienced as an odd and ugly spinster. She wants no longer “to be shut out, barred out, to be always an outsider or an extra!” She wants full participation in her passions.

Now, Voyager does not end happily ever after. But it does not end tragically either. It rewrites the Stella Dallas or Mildred Pierce story of self-sacrificing single motherhood and takes out the self-sacrifice. In the end, Stella and Mildred lose their daughters and their dream of romantic love. In a way, Charlotte keeps both. Her choice to devote herself to an adopted daughter rather than marrying a man she doesn’t love allows her to feel continuing currents of unsublimated romantic and sexual emotion; it even swells and floods them. For Charlotte, taking care of Tina is not a substitute for life with Jerry. Instead, single motherhood allows Charlotte to attain domestic and maternal bliss while remaining dazzled by desire for the unattainable man she believes she still loves, marriage and happy ending be damned.

Four years later, in It’s a Wonderful Life , Donna Reed would ask Jimmy Stewart for the moon, and get it, but for those four charmed intervening years spinsters could revel shameless in their starry moonless night.

By Briallen Hopper   ©2012 NotComing.com

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Mildred Pierce

Eve Arden, Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Bruce Bennett, and Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce (1945)

A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter. A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter. A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.

  • Michael Curtiz
  • Ranald MacDougall
  • James M. Cain
  • William Faulkner
  • Joan Crawford
  • Jack Carson
  • Zachary Scott
  • 419 User reviews
  • 111 Critic reviews
  • 88 Metascore
  • 3 wins & 6 nominations total

Trailer

  • Mildred Pierce Beragon

Jack Carson

  • Monte Beragon

Eve Arden

  • Veda Pierce

Bruce Bennett

  • Bert Pierce

Lee Patrick

  • Maggie Biederhof

Moroni Olsen

  • Inspector Peterson

Veda Ann Borg

  • Miriam Ellis

Jo Ann Marlowe

  • See all cast & crew
  • William Faulkner (uncredited)
  • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

  • Trivia Michael Curtiz was initially less than keen at working with Joan Crawford . Curtiz was soon won over by Crawford's dedication and hard work.
  • Goofs Mildred's house on Corvallis Street in Glendale is shown as a one-story Spanish-style bungalow; however, the interior has a staircase leading to the bedrooms.

Ida Corwin : [to Wally about his lustful looks in her direction] Leave something on me. I might catch cold.

  • Crazy credits The opening credits are presented with a background ocean scene that "washes" the credits on the screen.
  • Alternate versions Also shown in computer colorized version.
  • Connections Featured in Hollywood: The Fabulous Era (1962)
  • Soundtracks You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby (uncredited) Music by Harry Warren Lyrics by Johnny Mercer Played and sung at Wally's club toward the beginning Also played when Veda and Ted are at Wally's club

User reviews 419

  • Aug 21, 2002
  • How long is Mildred Pierce? Powered by Alexa
  • October 20, 1945 (United States)
  • United States
  • Solange ein Herz schlägt
  • 26652 Latigo Shore Drive, Malibu, California, USA (Location)
  • Warner Bros.
  • See more company credits at IMDbPro
  • $1,453,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

  • Runtime 1 hour 51 minutes
  • Black and White

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Eve Arden, Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth, Bruce Bennett, and Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce (1945)

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IMAGES

  1. Now, Voyager (1942)

    mildred pierce music now voyager

  2. SOUNDTRACK

    mildred pierce music now voyager

  3. Amazon.com: The Leading Ladies Collection (Now Voyager / Mildred Pierce

    mildred pierce music now voyager

  4. Now, Voyager

    mildred pierce music now voyager

  5. Now, Voyager (1942)

    mildred pierce music now voyager

  6. Now, Voyager (1942)

    mildred pierce music now voyager

COMMENTS

  1. Now, Voyager (1942)

    Music by Alberto Domínguez. Played as dance music in the Rio Club. Yankee Doodle. (ca. 1755) (uncredited) Traditional music of English origin. Variation in the score when the Statue of Liberty is onscreen. In An Old Dutch Garden (By An Old Dutch Mill) (1940) (uncredited) Music by Will Grosz.

  2. Now Voyager (1942) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

    Now Voyager (1942) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 1. Fanfare/Main Title 2. Love Scene/Finale. Music by Max Steiner. From the 1942 film "Now Voyager" sta...

  3. 10 great Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s

    Hankies at the ready for our rundown of Hollywood's great misty-eyed melodramas of the 1940s, from Mildred Pierce to Now, Voyager. ... a nod to melodrama's etymological root as a "drama with music". Dunne later said she loved the film because it reminded her of her own adopted daughter, while Grant - whose first and only child was ...

  4. Music from Now, Voyager Soundtrack : Cues & Suites (Max Steiner)

    The Oscar winning score of Now, Voyager by Max Steiner has long been sought for by fans of film music, especially Golden Age film music. Sadly, the OST has n...

  5. Max Steiner

    The late Max Steiner was one of the true pioneers of the genre known as movie music. ... Mildred Pierce, Now Voyager, Stolen Life and San Antonio among others. Following his initial Oscar for The Informer he won two others for his scores for Now Voyager in 1943, and for Since You Went Away in 1945. Over the period of his Hollywood career, Max ...

  6. Mildred Pierce (1945)

    Mildred Pierce (1945) Pages: Plot Synopsis (continued) ... [Again, the theme music from Now, Voyager plays on the soundtrack.] Mildred's estranged husband Bert barges in during the middle of their embrace and deliberately slams the restaurant door shut to announce himself. He speaks to Mildred privately, agreeing to the divorce while avoiding ...

  7. Max Steiner: The Father of Film Music

    Max Steiner, composed the 1933 score for King Kong and was one of the true pioneers of the genre known as movie music. ... The Charge of the Light Brigade, Mildred Pierce, Now, Voyager, Stolen Life and normal'>Gone with the Wind, which included the most popular of all his works, 'Tara's Theme,' never won an Oscar or any other award.

  8. Now, Voyager: We Have the Stars

    Nov 26, 2019. I n a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte Vale, spinster, has emerged from her cocoon. One of " the Vales, of Boston," Charlotte has been ...

  9. Mildred Pierce (1945)

    Careful listening reveals it's the theme Max Steiner composed for the Bette Davis picture Now, Voyager (1942). Mildred Pierce certainly wasn't the first Hollywood film to deal with obsessive mother-daughter relationships. ... In the movie, she still takes music lessons and performs but it is merely a minor plot detail. And Monty is transformed ...

  10. Mildred Pierce (1945)

    Mildred Pierce : Film Structure. Tag Cloud. Release date: October 20, 1945: Studio: Warner Brothers: Runtime: ... Now, Voyager (1942) My Reputation (1946) Combinations. Name Uses; Mazurka in B-Flat Major + Mildred: 1 Source Music. Name Uses; Mazurka in B-Flat Major: 2 Waltz Brillante: 2 You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby: 2

  11. "Now, Voyager":

    "Box office dynamite—that's 'Now, Voyager'." Those are the first words of Naka's "Now Voyager" Variety film review, as published August 19, 1942. ... in 1941), Greta Garbo (several pictures, such as "Anna Karenina," 1935, and "Camille," 1937), Joan Crawford ("Mildred Pierce," 1945), and—of course—Bette Davis. Up until today ...

  12. Now, Voyager (1942)

    Now, Voyager. Nervous spinster Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) is stunted from growing up under the heel of her puritanical Boston Brahmin mother (Gladys Cooper), and remains convinced of her own unworthiness until a kindly psychiatrist (Claude Rains) gives her the confidence to venture out into the world on a South American cruise.

  13. Music and Mildred Pierce, 1945 and 2011

    Register. Music and Mildred Pierce, 1945 and 2011 - 24 Hours access. EUR €51.00. GBP £44.00. USD $55.00.

  14. The Man Who Made Film Music

    By the time of his death in 1971, Steiner had scored some 300-odd feature films, including Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), John Ford's The Informer (1935), John Huston's Key Largo and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (both 1948), Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager (1942), Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949 ...

  15. Now, Voyager (1942)

    Now, Voyager: Directed by Irving Rapper. With Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper. A frumpy spinster blossoms under therapy and becomes an elegant, independent woman.

  16. An Austrian in Hollywood: Self-Plagiarism and the ...

    Steiner plagiarizes himself when this instrumental version is heard as source music in the 1945 Warner Bros. film Mildred Pierce. Vocal versions, including one recorded by Frank Sinatra, include ...

  17. Mildred Pierce Soundtrack (2011)

    Music plays an important role in Mildred Pierce. The soundtrack album features the striking original score by Carter Burwell, as well as selections from the film's operatic performances. Mildred Pierce soundtrack from 2011, composed by Various Artists, Carter Burwell. Released by Varese Sarabande in 2011 (302 067 086 2 / VSD-7086) containing ...

  18. Mildred Pierce/Now Voyager

    Sign-up: News on your favorite shows, specials & more! News. Latest News; Interviews; New Releases; Photos; Reviews; Tony Awards; Videos; Shows

  19. UHD Review

    Reporter, The Roaring Twenties, The Letter, Meet John Doe, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Now, Voyager, Casablanca, Dark Passage, Adventures of Don Juan, Strangers on a Train et al... Image - 4.75 (HDR) Audio - 5 Pass / Fail - Pass Plays nicely with projectors - Yes Makes use of and works well in 4k - 4 Upgrade from Blu-ray - Yes Very Highly ...

  20. Now, Voyager (1942)

    Now, Voyager. The biggest box office hit of Bette Davis 's career. Paul Henreid 's act of lighting two cigarettes at once caught the public's imagination, and he couldn't go anywhere without being accosted by women begging him to light cigarettes for them. The movie's line "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."

  21. Now, Voyager: The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner

    The lush sound of the music composed in the Hollywood Golden Age is perfectly captured by the opulent National Philharmonic Orchestra and Gerhardt is a master in recreating all the nuances of this gorgeous music. One last word about "The Fountainhead": in this album the suite is 8:07 minutes long.

  22. notcoming.com

    Now, Voyager does not end happily ever after. But it does not end tragically either. It rewrites the Stella Dallas or Mildred Pierce story of self-sacrificing single motherhood and takes out the self-sacrifice. In the end, Stella and Mildred lose their daughters and their dream of romantic love. In a way, Charlotte keeps both.

  23. Mildred Pierce (1945)

    Mildred Pierce: Directed by Michael Curtiz. With Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden. A hard-working mother inches towards disaster as she divorces her husband and starts a successful restaurant business to support her spoiled daughter.