Announcing: Always on Sunday

Sundays will now feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, "Never on Sunday," starring Melina Mercouri (1920-1994). According to Wikipedia,

It won the Academy Award for Best Song (Manos Hadjidakis for "Never on Sunday"). It was nominated for the Academy Awards for, respectively, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Melina Mercouri), Best Costume Design, Black-and-White, Best Director (Jules Dassin), and Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay as Written Directly for the Screen (Dassin). Mercouri won the award for Best Actress at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.

The 2011 HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce recently afforded my wife and me over five hours of melodramatic entertainment.

Mildred Pierce (HBO 2011: Todd Haynes) [Based on James M. Cain's 1941 hardboiled novel, which was also made into an Oscar-winning 1945 film starring Joan Crawford. Divorced single mom Mildred Pierce (Kate Winslet) decides to open a restaurant business, which tears at the already-strained relationship with her ambitious elder daughter, Veda (Morgan Turner, in Parts I-III, and Evan Rachel Wood, in Parts IV & V).] [VG] 7-6&7-2012

    I said to my wife that a number of scenes seemed poorly directed, especially those of Melissa Leo, who played Mildred's friend Lucy Gessler. They seemed more theatrical to me than cinematic. Not the Melissa Leo I became accustomed to as Detective Kay Howard in Homicide: Life on the Street.
    But my wife thought the effect was probably intentional, a throwback to the tempo and style of any number of films about the Depression era that she said she could remember watching as a child.
    Perhaps, in general, for I seemed to have a similar memory. But too many scenes with Miss Leo (and a few with Evan Rachel Wood in the role of Mildred's elder daughter, Veda) stuck out as in need of a re-take.
    I told my wife, "But the Jack Nicholson, Jessica Lange movie of Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice was set in that period, and it wasn't like that."
    "It was brought up-to-date, made contemporary," she said. You wouldn't pursue this any further with your wife either, would you?

Miss Winslet's performance is fine, as you'd expect. Mildred is a sympathetic character, so incautious of danger on occasion as to make me feel uncomfortable and nearly lose patience with her. That is, I just couldn't identify with her, couldn't overcome my aversion to her naiveté.
    But Guy Pearce is superb in the sharply drawn character of Mildred's exploitive lover Monty Beragon. For my money, Pearce always pleases. My favorite of his roles (until Monty) has been that of Adam Whitely/Felicia Jollygoodfellow in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
    I forgot to study the credits carefully to try to find out whether a real coloratura soprano had dubbed Miss Wood's singing. Maybe Miss Wood was the real coloratura—she's a highly accomplished young actress (born in Raleigh, fifty miles east of Mebane). No mention of coloratura in her detailed IMDb bio.

Maybe my wife was right.^* Director Todd Haynes was quoted in New York Times movie critic Dennis Lim's March 18 review, "Mildred Pierce: A Mother’s House of Love and Hurt," as saying:

I wanted to see if [the open, searching quality that defined the American cinema of my youth] could work again. The idea was to use old movies, old genres, and old subject matter to trick people into thinking about their world today.

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* She always is.