censorship, (21)

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out to be a lethal femme murderess who kills him (when he calls her a tramp and refuses to dump Mildred and marry her). Mildred tries to take the blame for Veda, but in the end she reunites with Bert, who validates her innocence as police haul irredeemable Veda off to jail.

Mildred Pierce reflects Hollywood^ effort to modify Cain’s story for a małe, as well as female, audience. Screenwriter Catherine Turney, who col-laborated on the script, had started at MGM and was one of the first women writers to work at Warner Bros. in the 1940S. Turney was known as a “womans writer,” and her first assignment at the studio was Mildred Pierce. According to Turney, “Jack Wafner didn’t really like women writers,” but he realized they could make money for the studio. (Turney also notes that female saląries were only a fraction of małe salaries.) Turney explains, “One of the reasons they hired me is that the men were off at the war, and they had all these big female stars” wanting “roles that served them well”—not passively “sitting around being a simpering nobody” but rather taking ac-tion and often “battling against the odds.”³² Producer Jerry Wald cast Joan Crawford as Mildred, an ideał comeback for the former MGM diva who had refused mediocre Scripts and middle-aged, past-her-prime roles dur-ing a two-year hiatus from the screen prior to signing with Warner Bros. in 1944. Crawford demonstrated that she could battle the odds and beat out the competition in fighting for the role—impressing Wald and Curtiz after Double Indemnity spider woman Barbara Stanwyck and Warner femme Bette Davis turned it down. The Warner Bros. project featured a woman’s story, a major female star, and a woman writer to appeal to a female audience.

Men, however, still dominated many aspects of the production for Mildred Pierce. Jerry Wald had just fmished a series of action-oriented war films, or “men’s pictures,” such as Objectwe Burma, Destination Tokyo, and Pride of the Marines. Michael Curtiz had recently directed Casablanca, Dodge City, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Passage to Marseille. Małe executive Jack Warner ran the Warner Bros. Hollywood studio. Other małe screen-writers on the project included male-action specialist Albert Maltz (who adapted This Gun for Hire and scripted Destination Tokyo), Ranald Mac-Dougall (the only writer to receive screen credit for Mildred Pierce, a favorite writer of Wald’s who scripted Objectwe Burma), and William Faulkner (who worked with Howard Hawks on Air Force, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep, opting not to receive screen credit on Mildred Pierce). The małe author collective of producer Wald, director Curtiz, executive Warner, and writers such as Maltz, Faulkner, and MacDougall presided. Turney was ini-tially used for the “female angle,” but her input on Mildred Pierce was rewrit-

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ten, produced, and directed by males to reinforce a macho crime ethos in order to capitalize on the framework and success of Double Indemnity.

Wald initially sought not a woman but Cain himself for the project; however, Cain was under contract to MGM at the time. In the box-office glow of Double Indemnity Cain wrote to Wald “stressing that Mildred Pierce was an attempt to develop a serious theme” and “objecting to Warner’s at-tempt to exploit his literary and cinematic reputation—based, as it was, on Postman and Double Indemnity—by turning Mildred into that kind of Cain thriller.” Cain told Wald the opening of Warners’ screen adaptation has “tin-gle, the promise of great photographic effectiveness, and that curious qual-ity describable only as style, which I imagine Curtiz had a great deal to do with.” Cain, however, asserted that the “only point developed in this footage is: Who done it? This, it seems to me, is a very thin springboard for a story.” He argued, “Mildred Pierce is one woman’s struggle against a great social in-justice—which is the mother’s necessity to support her children even though husband and community give her not the slightest assistance.” It was a great wartime theme for the home front. Both Cain and Turney op-posed “superimposing the murder on the story” of Mildred Pierce in an ef-fort to turn it into what Cain described as “another Double Indemnity.”³³ Yet Cain and Turney were unsuccessful in discouraging a male-oriented suspensę flashback framework. Though Turney worked on the screenplay, Wald added a Double IndemnityAike flashback structure with voice-over narra-tion to the story in spite of her objection. Turney described Wald’s “intro-duction of the flashback idea” into Warners’ adaptation of Cain’s novel as “pure gimmick,” along with using a murder to open the film—devices that turned a straight female melodrama ińto a crime thriller.³⁴ Wald again sought Cain, who suggested female writer Margaret Gruen forthe project; Wald hired her and then put małe action specialist Maltz on the script to re-vise Gruen’s work. Wald later brought Turney back onto the project yet in-structed her to follow Maltz’s outline and narrative framework—which in-cluded a morę masculine murder/flashback narration structuring the story.

In a 1944 Paramount press release Cain noted the impact of the adaptation of Double Indemnity on Hollywood film trends, referring to it as his most censorable story: “It may be, sińce the word ‘adult’ is the one review-ers use most. freąuently in connection with it, that a new field for moving pictures has been opened up.”³⁵ Cain acknowledged the significance of the sordid, formerly banned film adaptation being approved as a censorship precedent in Hollywood during the war. “If Breen would approve a script of Double Indemnity that adhered so dosely to the original story, he would