My local video rental place didn't have a copy of Michael Curtiz's 1945 film Mildred Pierce for which Joan Crawford won an Oscar; and I spent an unsuccessful evening trying to download it (legally, illegally, who knows, surely it's so ancient it doesn't matter?) from the internet. I have seen it but clearly I don't remember it well enough to make any meaningful comparison between it and Todd Haynes's new five-part HBO mini-series version of Mildred Pierce (Sky Atlantic, Saturday). I can picture Crawford, in all the pomp and glory of 1940s Hollywood melodrama, Acting with a capital A.
Kate Winslet's new Mildred is subtler and more nuanced. It's a beautiful performance, of a woman in dowdy dresses struggling to maintain her social status in the depression of the the 1930s. When we first meet her, she's painstakingly icing a cake to sell, before tackling her good-for-nothing husband about his infidelities. The resulting row ends with his departure, from the house and from her life, leaving her with two girls to bring up alone. Apart from an awkward romp with her husband's business partner, the rest of this opening episode is taken up with Mildred looking for a job and the shame of having to take on work (waitressing) beneath her station.
Galloping, rat-a-tat, quick-fire drama this isn't. The camera lingers on period furnishings and kitchenware, setting the scene, ramming home the era. Or it lingers on Winslet's expressions. I hesitate to use the word plodding, because it is compelling, in a dark but human kind of way . . . Oh, all right then, it does plod a bit. It may be beautiful and sumptuous, but there's not enough going on, or even enough hints of what will go on. If you haven't seen the old movie, or read James M Cain's novel which this version follows more faithfully, you might not come back for more – and you'd miss the passion and sensuality that will come with the arrival of the real love interest (played by Guy Pearce), Mildred's rise to success in a man's world, her increasingly difficult relationship with her elder daughter, who turns into a monster . . . I don't want to give too much away.
I've watched one more episode, and things do begin to get going. It's probably worth sticking with, not for the fun of it – there's not much of that around – but because it will suck you in. And Winslet, in a bravely unglamorous role, continues to mesmerise. She won't win an Oscar of course, it being television, but she might win something.
You'd think the The TV Book Club (More4, Sunday) might have a novelist on its panel, given that it's a show about novels. But they – Jo Brand, Adrian Edmondson, Rory McGrath and Meera Syal – are all comedians and actors. I know they've written books, but books isn't what they do for a day job. The guest – Bettany Hughes – is a historian. Well, at least she's been on the judging panel of a literary prize, she must have read a lot of books.
Ah, and here's the novelist, via outside broadcast. Amis, McEwen, Smith, Ali . . ? No, Cooper (Jilly). But she's got some terrific advice for aspiring writers: put a lot of colours in. "'A man riding down a road on a horse' is a boring sentence. 'A man in a red coat riding down a green grassy lane on a grey horse' is a beautiful sentence." It's easy really. Oh, and lots of sex too, and animals, that's it really, all you need.
We visit another novelist – Deborah Lawrenson – in her house in Provence, before the panel discuss her book, The Lantern, about two different women in two different times in a house in Provence. Ade likes it, says it has a good sense of place and he enjoys the smells in it; Rory thinks it has too many adjectives; Jo is irritated by one of the characters who she describes as a "a nana". And a man in a book group in Winkwell in Hertfordshire says it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Of course they do that – go to the book group – because it's in the spirit of these times, when everyone's interested in what everyone's got to say. I'm clearly living in the past though, because I'm not that fussed about what the Winkwell book group thinks; I still want to know what some kind of book expert thinks – a writer even.
