At once a maternal melodrama about the impossibility of buying unconditional love and a hard-boiled noir about the loneliness of upward mobility, Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce remains one of the most influential cinematic depictions of motherhood today. Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford, who won her only Academy Award for the role) arrives at the police department after the murder of her second husband. She is armed only with memories: of a disastrous first marriage; of raising two daughters alone; of toiling to satisfy the girls' taste for finer things and to soothe their post-Depression intergenerational fear of poverty; of attaining unimaginable success; of falling for the cheap flattery of frivolous men. Through these recollections, Mildred's eldest daughter Veda (Ann Blyth, as an unforgettably impish femme fatale) emerges as the cold object of her obsessive affections. Born into middle-class stability, Veda's new-money inferiority complex has calcified into narcissistic cruelty. By trimming the scope and context of James M. Cain's 1941 novel, Curtiz crafts Mildred's biography into an all-American myth of stark detail and cosmic devastation. The film was a box office success and marked a career comeback for Crawford, whose piercing gaze and glamour makes her sincere plea to be loved even more disarming.