Appearance
🎉 your ETH🥳
"Mildred Pierce is a 1941 hardboiled novel by James M. Cain. It was made into an Academy Award–winning film of the same name in 1945, starring Joan Crawford, and a 2011 Emmy Award–winning miniseries of the same name, starring Kate Winslet. Plot Set in Glendale, California, in the 1930s, the book is the story of a middle-class housewife, Mildred Pierce, and her attempts to maintain her family's social position during the Great Depression. Mildred separates from Bert, her unemployed husband, and sets out to support herself and her children. After a difficult search she finds a job as a waitress, but she worries that it is beneath her middle-class station. More than that, she worries that her ambitious and increasingly pretentious elder daughter, Veda, will think her new job demeaning. Mildred encounters both success and failure as she opens three successful restaurants, operates a pie-selling business and copes with the death of her younger daughter, Ray. Veda enjoys her mother's newfound financial success but increasingly turns ungrateful, demanding more and more from her hard-working mother while openly condemning her and anyone else who must work for a living. When Mildred discovers her daughter's plot to blackmail a wealthy family with a fake pregnancy, she kicks her out of their house. Veda, who has been training to become an opera singer, goes on to great fame, and Mildred's increasing obsession with her daughter leads her to use her former lover, Monty (a man who, like Mildred, lost his family's wealth at the start of the Great Depression), and his social status and connection to bring Veda back into her life. Unfortunately for Mildred, this means buying Monty's family estate and using her earnings to pay for Veda's extravagances. Mildred and Monty marry, but things go sour as her lavish lifestyle and neglect of her businesses has dramatically affected the company's profits. Creditors line up, led by Wally, a former business associate of Bert's, with whom Mildred had a brief affair upon their separation. With no one to turn to, Mildred confesses to Bert that she has been embezzling money from her company in order to buy Veda's love. Having decided that the only course of action is to ask Veda to contribute some of her now considerable earnings to balance the books and fearing that Wally might target the girl's assets if they are exposed Mildred goes to her room to confront her. She finds Veda in bed with her stepfather. Monty reproaches Mildred for using him to bring Veda back and for her attitude to him as a financial dependent of hers, while Veda affects boredom but joins in to chide Mildred for embarrassing her and taking glory in her success. Mildred snaps, brutally attacking and strangling her daughter, who now appears incapable of singing and loses her singing contract. Weeks pass as Mildred moves to Reno, Nevada, to establish residency in order to get a speedy divorce from Monty. Bert moves out to visit her. Mildred ultimately is forced to resign from her business empire, leaving it to Ida, a former company assistant. Bert and Mildred, upon the finalization of her divorce, remarry. Veda travels to Reno and apparently reconciles with Mildred but, several months later, Veda reveals that her voice has healed and announces that she is moving to New York City with Monty. The "reconciliation" (which had been accompanied by reporters and photographers) was designed to defuse the negative publicity resulting from the affair with her stepfather and it emerges her apparent loss of her voice was a ploy so that she could renege on her existing singing contract and be free to take up a more lucrative one offered by another company. As she leaves the house, a broken Mildred, encouraged by Bert, eventually says "to hell" with the monstrous Veda, and the pair agree to get "stinko" (drunk). Characters *Mildred Pierce – a middle- class mother of two *Bert Pierce – Mildred's first and, later, her third husband *Moire ("Ray") Pierce, Mildred's younger daughter * Veda Pierce – Mildred's elder daughter *Wally Burgan – Bert's former business partner *Monty Beragon – a wealthy playboy, Mildred's lover and later her second husband *Lucy Gessler – Mildred's friend Adaptations =1945= In 1945, the novel was made into a film starring Joan Crawford, Eve Arden, Ann Blyth, Jack Carson, Bruce Bennett, Zachary Scott, and Lee Patrick. The screenplay was adapted by Ranald MacDougall, William Faulkner, and Catherine Turney and was directed by Michael Curtiz. The Motion Picture Production Code in force at the time specified that 11 subjects "shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association" and listed 25 other subjects where "special care be exercised in the manner in which... [they] are treated." These provisions made it impossible to film a literal depiction of the events in the novel. The screenplay removes any depiction of a sexual relationship (which would have been both incest and infidelity) between Monty and his stepdaughter, Veda. In the film, Mildred neither discovers them in bed nor injures Veda in any way. These elements were replaced with a murder mystery told in flashbacks. In the movie, Veda commences an affair with Monty and kills him when he refuses to divorce Mildred to marry her. Mildred initially confesses to Monty's murder in order to shield Veda from prosecution but ultimately gives her over to the authorities. Mildred Pierce was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (both Arden and Blyth), Best Screenplay and Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Ernest Haller). Crawford won the film's only Academy Award, as Best Actress. =1954= An hour long radio play of the novel was first broadcast by the Lux Radio Theatre on the NBC Radio Network on 14th June 1954 starring Zachary Scott (also in the 1945 film) and Claire Trevor. =1993= A one-and-a-half hour dramatisation by John Fletcher for the Radio Noir series for Saturday Night Theatre on BBC Radio 4 was first broadcast on 26th June 1993. Shelley Thompson featured in the title role with Martin Jarvis as Monte Beragon and Ed Bishop as Bert Pierce. =2011= Director Todd Haynes filmed a five-part miniseries for television, with Kate Winslet as Mildred, Guy Pearce as Monty Beragon, and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda, in spring 2010 (with Morgan Turner as the young Veda). Haynes wrote the script with Jon Raymond and served as an executive producer with Pamela Koffler, John Wells, Ilene S. Landress and Christine Vachon, along with HBO in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The miniseries aired on HBO, starting on March 27, 2011, and ending with a two-part finale on April 10, 2011. Unlike the movie version, it is almost a word-for-word dramatization of the novel, including nearly every scene and using Cain's dialogue. It features period music performed by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks Orchestra. See also *1941 in literature References *Warner Brothers Archives, http://www.usc.edu/libraries/collections/warner_bros/. A list of actresses drawn up by producer Jerry Wald shows Crawford's name at the top of a list of actresses mentioned for the role in 1942. In the file for Mildred Pierce, neither Bette Davis nor Barbara Stanwyck is mentioned for the role at any stage. Ann Sheridan's name came up when negotiations with Crawford broke down in 1944, during her first year at Warner Bros. Category:1941 American novels Category:Alfred A. Knopf books Category:American crime novels Category:American novels adapted into films Category:Glendale, California Category:Novels adapted into radio programs Category:Novels adapted into television shows Category:Novels by James M. Cain Category:Novels set in California "
"Perils of Pauline, which popularized the term cliffhanger in the medium of film. A cliffhanger or cliffhanger ending is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a precarious or difficult dilemma or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of an episodeSome are placed before commercial breaks of serialized fiction. A cliffhanger is hoped to incentivize the audience to return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma. Some serials end with the caveat, "to be Continued" or "the end?"; in movie serials and television series, the following episode sometimes begins with a recap sequence. History Cliffhangers were used as literary devices in several works of the medieval era. The Arabic literary work One Thousand and One Nights involves Scheherazade narrating a series of stories to King Shahryār for 1,001 nights, with each night ending on a cliffhanger in order to save herself from execution. Some medieval Chinese ballads like the Liu chih-yuan chu-kung-tiao ended each chapter on a cliffhanger to keep the audience in suspense. Cliffhangers later appeared as an element of the Victorian serial novel that emerged in the 1840s, with many associating the form with Charles Dickens, a pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction.Grossman, Jonathan H. (2012). Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. p. 54. Oxford: Oxford University Press. By the 1860s it had become a staple part of the sensation serials, while the term itself originated with Thomas Hardy in 1873 when a protagonist from one of his serials, Henry Knight, was left hanging off a cliff. =Victorian serials= Cliffhangers became prominent with the serial publication of narrative fiction, pioneered by Charles Dickens. Printed episodically in magazines, Dickens's cliffhangers triggered desperation in his readers. Writing in the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum captured the anticipation of those waiting for the next installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; The impact of Dickens's serial publications saw the cliffhanger become a staple part of the sensation serials by the 1860s.Allen, Rob (2014). "Serialization in Popular Culture". p. 41. Routledge =Etymology= The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (which was published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left hanging off a cliff. Serial media =Early film= Cliffhangers were especially popular from the 1910s through to the 1930s serials when nickelodeons and movie theaters filled the cultural niche later primarily occupied by television. During the 1910s, when Fort Lee, New Jersey was a center of film production, the cliffs facing New York and the Hudson River were frequently used as film locations.Kahn, Eve M "Getting a Close-Up of the Silent-Film Era" https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/nyregion/getting-a-close-up-of-the-silent- film-era.html The New York Times (August 15, 2013) The most notable of these films was The Perils of Pauline, a serial which helped popularize the term cliffhanger. In them, the serial would often end suddenly leaving actress Pearl White's Pauline character literally hanging from a cliff.Verdon, Joan "A hike back in time to era of silent film" Bergen County Record (March 5, 2012) =Modern usage= Cliffhangers are often used in television series, especially soap operas and game shows. Several Australian soap operas, which went off air over summer, such as Number 96, The Restless Years, and Prisoner, ended each year with major and much publicized catastrophe, such as a character being shot in the final seconds of the year's closing episode. Cliffhangers are commonly used in Japanese manga and anime. In contrast to American superhero comics, Japanese manga are much more frequently written with cliffhangers, often with each volume or issue. This is particularly the case with shōnen manga, especially those published by Weekly Shōnen Jump, such as Dragon Ball, Shaman King, and One Piece. During its original run, Doctor Who was written in a serialised format that usually ended each episode within a serial on a cliffhanger. In the first few years of the show, the final episodes of each serial would have a cliffhanger that would lead into the next serial. The programme's cliffhangers sometimes caused controversy, most notably Part Three of The Deadly Assassin (1976), which was altered for future broadcasts following a complaint from campaigner Mary Whitehouse. The producer of the series at the time, Philip Hinchcliffe, cited the 1950s radio serial Journey into Space as an influence for its use of cliffhangers. Another Doctor Who serial, Dragonfire (1987), is notable for having a cliffhanger that involved the Seventh Doctor literally hanging from a cliff, which has been described as "the most ludicrous ever presented in Doctor Who". Another British science fiction series, Blake's 7, employed end-of-season cliffhangers for three of the four seasons the series was on air, most notably for its final episode in 1981 in which the whole of the main cast are seemingly killed. Cliffhangers were rare on American television before 1980, as television networks preferred the flexibility of airing episodes in any order. The sitcom Soap was the first US television programme to utilise the cliffhanger, at the end of its first season in 1978. Cliffhangers then went on to become a staple of American primetime soap operas; the phenomenal success of the 1980 "Who shot J.R.?" third season-ending cliffhanger of Dallas, and the "Who Done It" fourth-season episode that finally solved the mystery, contributed to the cliffhanger becoming a common storytelling device on American television. Another notable cliffhanger was the "Moldavian Massacre" on Dynasty in 1985, which fueled speculation throughout the summer months regarding who lived or died when almost all the characters attended a wedding in the country of Moldavia, only to have revolutionaries topple the government and machine-gun the entire wedding party. Cliffhanger endings in films date back to the early 20th century, and were prominently used in the movie serials of the 1930s (such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers), though these tended to be resolved with the next installment the following week. A longer term cliffhanger was employed in the Star Wars film series, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in which Darth Vader made a shock revelation to Luke Skywalker that he was his father, and the life of Han Solo was in jeopardy after he was frozen and taken away by a bounty hunter. These plotlines were left unresolved until the next film in the series three years later. The two main ways for cliffhangers to keep readers/viewers coming back is to either involve characters in a suspenseful, possibly life-threatening situation, or to feature a sudden shocking revelation. Cliffhangers are also used to leave open the possibility of a character being killed off due to the actor not continuing to play the role. Cliffhangers are also sometimes deliberately inserted by writers who are uncertain whether a new series or season will be commissioned, in the hope that viewers will demand to know how the situation is resolved. Such was the case with the second season of Twin Peaks, which ended in a cliffhanger similar to the first season with a high degree of uncertainty about the fate of the protagonist, but the cliffhanger could not save the show from being canceled, resulting in the unresolved ending. The cliffhanger has become a genre staple (especially in comics, due to the multi- part storylines becoming the norm instead of self-contained stories) to such a degree, in fact, that series writers no longer feel they have to be immediately resolved, or even referenced, when the next episode is shown, variously because the writer didn't feel it was "a strong enough opener," or simply "couldn't be bothered." The heavily serialized television drama True Blood has become notorious for cliffhangers. Not only do the seasons conclude with cliffhangers, but almost every episode finishes at a cliffhanger directly after or during a highly dramatic moment. Commercial breaks can be a nuisance to script writers because some sort of incompleteness or minor cliffhanger should be provided before each to stop the viewer from changing channels during the commercial break. Sometimes a series ends with an unintended cliffhanger caused by a very abrupt ending without a satisfactory dénouement, but merely assuming that the viewer will assume that everything sorted itself out. Sometimes a movie, book, or season of a television show will end with the defeat of the main villain before a second, evidently more powerful villain makes a brief appearance (becoming the villain of the next film). Occasionally an element other than a villain is also used to tease at a sequel. Peter Hogg's novel Smilla's Sense of Snow ends with a deliberate cliffhanger, with the protagonist and main villain involved in a life-and-death chase on the arctic ice off Greenland - and in this case, the author has no intention of ever writing a sequel, the ambiguous ending being part and parcel of the basic ideas permeating the book's plot. Similarly, Michael Flynn's science fiction novelette The Forest of Time ends with a deliberate and permanent cliffhanger: readers are not to be ever told where the protagonist ended up in his wandering the "forest" of alternate history timelines and whether he ever got back to his home and his beloved, nor whether the war which takes a large part of the plot ended in victory for the Good Guys or the Bad Guys. George Cukor, when adapting in 1972 Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt deliberately introduced a cliffhanger missing from the original. While Greene's book ended with the protagonists definitely choosing the adventurous and rather shady life of smugglers in Paraguay and closing off other options for their future, at the conclusion of the Cukor film a character is seen tossing a coin whose fall would determine their next move, and the film ends on a freeze frame shot as the characters await the fall of the coin. See also *Back-to-back film production *Bluma Zeigarnik References Books *Vincent Fröhlich: Der Cliffhanger und die serielle Narration. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015. . Category:Television terminology Category:Fiction Category:Plot (narrative) Category:Endings "
""