Summary
We see waves crashing on a beach as the credits roll. All of a sudden, we see a man getting shot and falling onto the ground, and saying "Mildred." A door to the house slams as the killer leaves, but we do not see who it is.
On a rainy dock, we see a woman in a fur coat, Mildred, walking and staring at the ocean and crying. As she goes to throw herself into the water, a cop taps the railing nearby to stop her. Shining his flashlight on her, the cop scolds her for almost killing herself, telling her that if she jumped in he'd have to follow her and would probably catch pneumonia. The woman walks away down the docks.
As she passes a bustling bar, a man, Wally Fay, taps on the window and goes out to talk with her. He invites her in to have a free drink, as he is the owner of the bar. Inside, Mildred takes a seat at a table while a woman sings onstage nearby. Wally flirts with Mildred, who remains stone-faced, and downs her drink in one gulp. When Wally comments on the fact that she's never been a big drinker like that, she tells him, "I've learned how these last few months. I've learned a lot of things."
"There's better things to drink at the beach house, Wally," she says, and they leave the bar to go there. They enter the beach house, the house where we saw the man get murdered in the first scene. Wally asks Mildred if her husband is there, and she tells him he isn't. They go into the kitchen, but over by the coffee table, we see the dead body of the man from the first scene on the floor.
In the kitchen, Mildred asks Wally why he doesn't seem happy to be there. They toast, and Wally asks Mildred why she brought him there, all of a sudden, with her husband gone. "Maybe I find you irresistible," says Mildred, coyly. He tells her he always gets what he wants, then goes to kiss her, but she pushes his drink out of his hand and onto the floor, telling him she wants to change her dress.
Wally keeps talking and Mildred leaves the door open so she can hear him, but instead of changing her dress, she just stands in the shadows, before closing the door. Wally gets up and tells Mildred to hurry up, asking her to say something. Suddenly, we see Mildred exiting the house from another door and running away. Wally goes to Mildred's room to open the door, but finds it locked. Confused, he goes to another door and finds that one locked as well.
Calling for Mildred, Wally runs up a spiral staircase, into a room where a fire is lit. He knocks over a lamp, when suddenly he sees the body of the dead man on the ground and examines the body, when the telephone rings. Wally wanders over to the phone and breaks its cord so it stops ringing, then sees the lights of a car pulling into the driveway. He tries to open yet another door but it's locked. Grabbing a chair, he breaks the glass on a nearby door and runs out of the house just as a cop car is shining a light at its exterior.
When the cops shoot at Wally, he cooperates and one of them goes in the house to see what's happened inside. The cop dresses Wally's wound as he tells him there's a dead body inside.
We see Mildred entering her house, where she encounters her daughter, who frantically tells her that the police are there to question her. Mildred sends her daughter to bed, then goes down to the police station with the men. Outside, one of the cops tells her, "It's your husband, he's been murdered," and Mildred acts shocked.
Down at the Hall of Justice, Mildred is brought into a room where she introduces herself as Mildred Pierce Beragon, after which she is brought into another room to be questioned. When she sits down, Mildred sees a friend of hers, Ida Corwin. As Ida is ushered out of the room, Wally is being brought in, and Ida says sarcastically, "What is this, a class reunion?" As he passes Mildred, Wally says, "I'll have a tough time talking my way out of this."
A little after 2 AM, a reporter comes in asking for a story. Mildred's ex-husband, Bert, is brought in to be questioned as well, and he sits in the corner looking at Mildred. At a quarter to three, they still haven't questioned Mildred, when suddenly she gets called into a room where she meets Inspector Peterson.
"I'm sorry about your husband, it must be quite a shock to you," Peterson says, before telling Mildred that they actually don't need to question her, that they're sure of who killed him. He offers her a cigarette, and as she lights it, he tells her that being a detective is like building an automobile. "The case is on ice," Peterson tells her, and when Mildred requests to know who killed her husband, they call in Bert, her ex. While Peterson is sure that it was Bert, Mildred is indignant and insists that they ought to consider Wally Fay.
When Mildred asks how they know it was Bert, Peterson pulls out the murder weapon, which belongs to Bert, and tells her that Bert did not deny the crime. "If there's one thing we know, it's that an innocent man denies the crime, loud and often," he says. Mildred resists, saying that he could never kill anyone, that she divorced him four years ago, but she realizes now she was wrong to. "Four years ago? He was in the real estate business, wasn't he?" Mildred agrees about this, telling Peterson that Bert and Wally were partners, but that their business went downhill when the Great Depression hit.
In flashback, we see Bert and Wally's real estate office, as Mildred narrates that Bert got out of real estate at that time. We see Bert leaving his real estate office, and walking home to their house on Corvallis Street, "where all the houses looked alike." We see Mildred in the kitchen, the place—she narrates—she feels she was born and meant to be her whole life. She narrates, "I married Bert when I was 17, I never knew any other kind of life. Just cooking and washing and having children. Two girls: Veda and Kay." We see a photograph of the daughters on the piano, as Bert lies down on the couch with the newspaper.
Mildred tells Bert that she saw an ad for a job, but he is impatient with her and tells her he'll find one when the time is right. Suddenly the doorbell buzzes, and Mildred answers to receive a package, a dress she bought for Veda. "Where'd you get the money?" Bert asks, and she tells him she got it baking cakes and pies for the neighbors. He confronts her for humiliating him while he's out of a job, and she snaps back that she is taking matters into her own hands, because she's frustrated with being confronted with so many unpaid bills.
Analysis
The film positions itself as a proper film noir from the start. Dramatic music plays as we see waves crash on the beach. Then, in the very first scene, we find ourselves in a chic, modern house on the coast, where inside, a man in a finely tailored suit is being shot down by an unseen assailant. Before any exposition has taken place, we see a particularly suspenseful and mysterious crime take place, followed by a suicide attempt by a woman in a fur coat. Not five minutes into the film, we are already deep in the classic intrigue and mystery that are the hallmarks of the film noir genre.
Before we know much about the titular character, Mildred Pierce, we know that she is an important figure in the film, and also a troubled one. The first line of the film is the dying man uttering her name as he falls to the floor. We then see her, about to throw herself off a dock, then wandering back towards land with tears streaming down her face. While we know that she is troubled, we do not know much else, and she has a disturbingly chilly air, a morbid secret that she hides behind a cool and haunted exterior.
Not only does the movie feel like a film noir tonally, but the way it is shot fits in with conventions of the genre. The settings especially and the photography give the uneasy sense of a film noir, a bleak post-Depression America in which secrets hang in the shadows. Shadow and light play off each other in the film's photography in a way that heightens the suspense of the scene. When we first see Mildred, she is walking along a dark dock, her pale skin picking up what little light is reflecting off of the waves crashing below. Then, at her beach house, her brief and ill-fated tryst with Wally is lit in a high contrast chiaroscuro, lending the already uncomfortable meeting an even eerier air.
Mildred's haunted attitude is not simply a mood, as we soon find out. Rather, it is connected to her desperate desire to escape from her beach house with the dead body in it and, apparently, to frame Wally for the murder of the man laid out on the carpet. While we do not know many details of how the man died, it seems fairly certain that Mildred is the one that killed him.
All of the ambiguities around the murder of Mildred's husband makes up a frame for the plot of the film itself. In the first 20 minutes of the film, the viewer is introduced to the various ingredients and it is heavily implied that Mildred was the one who killed her husband, but we have very little information about what her motive might be, who she is, and why she would frame Wally Fay. When she's called in for questioning, inspector Peterson tells her they've solved the case, but she is determined to tell her story. Mildred's story, portrayed in flashback, becomes the main narrative of the film, the missing piece in understanding the confusing course of events that start the film.
