Mildred Pierce directed by Todd Haynes based on the novel by James Cain HBO, Parts I—V, 2011,  300 min.

“Film noir,” a critic wrote, is the drama of class conflict and class resentments, powered by people who have lost social status or never had it, and who contrive violent shortcuts to comfort” (Seitz, 2011). James Cain's novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity , and the films made from them (dir. ; dir. ), seminally defined the genre of film noir. Cain's hard-boiled novels had a wide impact. Albert Camus cited The Postman Always Rings Twice as an influence on his novel, The Stranger.

Cain was always regarded as a misogynist, but with Mildred Pierce he created a different kind of literary character. First published in 1941 and made into a film in 1945 (dir. M. Curtiz) — for which Joan Crawford won an academy award — Mildred Pierce is more complex psychologically than Cain's previous novels, with background information allowing the reader to speculate on the dynamics of the characters. In his New Yorker review, Hilton Als (2011) recounts how Cain had recently befriended a woman, herself a single parent, who urged him toward a more sympathetic and complex view of women. This led him to explore what one of his lead characters would call “the great American institution that never gets mentioned on the Fourth of July, a grass widow with two small children to support” (, p. 13). Cain's conversion was not complete, however, for in Mildred's daughter Veda — variously referred to as “a viper,” “a grifter,” “an evil spawn” — he created a figure to rival the murderous women in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Veda is indeed monstrous, but as therapists we know that monsters are made, not born.

The HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce, directed , stars Kate Winslet as Mildred, with an excellent supporting cast, including Brian F. O'Byrne as Bert, Guy Pearce as Monty, Melissa Leo as Lucy, and