In the rancorous universe of James M. Cain’s early novels, life’s a bitch and she wears lipstick and a skirt. Men who should know better—cynical guys with hearts the size of a blister—burst wide open when they meet the dames who will, inevitably, bring them down. Frank Chambers, the gimlet-eyed, existential-minded drifter who narrates Cain’s first novel, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934)—Albert Camus cited Cain’s work as an influence on his own étranger—reveals his lust and his misogyny the moment he first catches sight of Cora, a cook at the tavern where he gets a job. “Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty,” Frank says, “but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” A hardboiled insurance agent named Walter Huff narrates Cain’s second novel, “Double Indemnity” (1936), set in creepy Hollywoodland. There Walter meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, a housewife with the survival instincts of a snake. Like Frank, Walter expresses a disdainful first opinion of his future lover: “She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas. She had a washed-out look.” But Walter’s wariness is also a prelude to obsession; eventually, he kills Mr. Nirdlinger for Phyllis, who wants the insurance money, just as Frank kills Cora’s husband. But why? Cora and Phyllis, both childless, married, for the usual reasons—shelter, money, respectability—older men they despised. Now these women want out; they have come to regard their conventional, controlled lives as a kind of death, thus prompting their need for death of another kind. This is where Frank and Walter come in. They carry out their girlfriends’ nefarious plans because they’re men, and can pass without suspicion in the world of men, who, ultimately, see only themselves.

Kate Winslet as Mildred Pierce in the HBO miniseries, directed by Todd Haynes. Photograph by ANDREW SCHWARTZ / COURTESY HBO

But by the late thirties, when Cain began to think about writing “Mildred Pierce,” his fourth novel—his third, the underappreciated “Serenade” (1937), was another first-person account of male alienation—life was dictating a new reality. (A five-part miniseries adapted from the book, and directed by Todd Haynes, will première on HBO on March 27th.) Cain had recently befriended a woman named Kate Cummings, who did perhaps more than anyone else to urge him toward a more sympathetic and complex view of women’s need for both conventionality and freedom. Cummings, the single mother of the actress Constance Cummings, had sacrificed her own prospects as a singer to get her daughter the training and the exposure she needed to become a star. What Cain saw of Kate’s life—and the nearly selfless love with which she made Constance’s career happen—may have jump-started his imagination. After creating two antiheroines, probably inspired by Hemingway’s view of woman-as-death, Cain paid homage to his friend’s indomitable spirit. He set out to explore what one of his 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.” As he was writing, employing the third person and creating a female protagonist for the first time, Cummings stood over him, prodding him to revise whenever she felt that his perceptions of a working mother did not ring true. When “Mildred Pierce” was finally published, in 1941, Cain’s alternately stilted and full-bodied portrait of a striving woman was well received, but few reviewers noted the fact that the novel was also a study of a woman who, time after time, subjugates her own needs to those of her child.

In “Mildred Pierce,” which is set in Depression-era Glendale, the sun-dappled curtain rises on a domestic scene of failure and dread. It’s 1931, and Herbert Pierce, a stylish family man in his mid-thirties, is tending the lawn. Taking care of his modest Spanish-style bungalow is one way for him to pass the time. Another is hanging out with the wonderfully named Maggie Biederhof, a neighborhood widow whose regard provides Herbert with a much needed ego boost: he’s unemployed. At the height of the go-go twenties, Herbert, a former stunt rider for the movies, teamed up with some developers to convert a ranch he’d inherited into a bedroom community, called Pierce Homes, with Herbert as its enthusiastic president. But when the stock market crashed so did Herbert’s dreams. Pierce Homes tanked, and now all the president has to hold on to, other than his lawnmower, is his pragmatic twenty-eight-year-old wife, Mildred, and their two daughters: Veda, a pretentious, musically inclined eleven-year-old, and the seven-year-old Moire, known as Ray.

Cain’s quick sketch of Herbert—filled with tension but no pity—sets up one of the book’s subplots: what ever happened to the white American male? The Depression has emasculated the cowboy, and his powerlessness has made him callow. Women like the resourceful Mildred have taken over as “man of the house.” Indeed, when we first meet Mildred, she’s working—making a cake for a neighbor—in order to put food on her family’s table. Herbert resents her for this, and, in an effort to upstage her, he flaunts a kind of “bad boy” elusiveness:

“You going to be home for supper?” “I’ll try to make it, but if I’m not home by six don’t wait for me. I may be tied up.” “I want to know.” “I told you, if I’m not home by six— ” “That doesn’t do me any good at all. I’m making this cake for Mrs. Whitley, and she’s going to pay me three dollars for it. Now if you’re going to be home I’ll spend part of that money on lamb chops for your supper. If you’re not, I’ll buy something the children will like better.” “Then count me out.”

The conversation deteriorates further. Mildred makes a crack about Mrs. Biederhof’s weight and demands to know if it’s with her that Herbert will be spending the rest of the day. Suppose it is? “Then you might as well pack right now, and leave for good,” Mildred says, pulling a cleaver from a drawer. After Herbert leaves, Mildred coolly gets back to her frosting.

In a sense, Mildred’s life doesn’t begin until Herbert is gone. And it is the stigma of being an upstanding woman alone—neither divorced nor married, no virgin but not especially sophisticated, either—that Haynes prods and questions in his rivetingly authoritative, erotic, and painstakingly faithful adaptation, which stars the ever-evolving Kate Winslet. In fact, Haynes’s relationship to Winslet—she’s in nearly every scene of the series—fascinates almost as much as the story he tells with her. Haynes manages to insinuate Winslet’s own narrative as a driven actress, whose physical beauty functions as a kind of vehicle for the transmission of ideas, into his exploration of Mildred and the political implications of her story. Like Cain, Haynes clearly conceives of “Mildred Pierce” as a feminist work, though not an ideological one: the title character rises and falls, and maybe rises again, against a background of male ineptitude and female know-how. (Haynes, who co-wrote the script with Jon Raymond, shows us even less of Mildred’s marriage than Cain did.) Haynes has Winslet play Mildred not so much through a gender-specific lens as through a nationalistic one: her Mrs. Pierce is the quintessence of American New Deal ingenuity, hard work, and fighting spirit. She is also a romantic, doomed to keep reinventing herself, because, like most romantics, she is repeatedly disappointed in her hopes both for herself and for others—primarily for Veda, a budding opera singer, whose distaste for her mother is compounded by sexual jealousy over her mother’s useless lover, the caddish Monty Beragon.

Cain’s mother, too, was a glamorous opera singer, and, like his father, she was a first-generation Irish-American Catholic. James W. Cain, a prominent educator, headed Washington College, in Maryland, as well as the Annapolis Board of Education. When James M. was born, in 1892—he died in 1977—his mother, Rose, was thirty, which was considered, at the time, alarmingly old to start a family. Nevertheless, four more children followed, all of whom inherited some aspect of their parents’ notable physical beauty. James, who was homely and bespectacled, felt like a bit of an outsider in his family—a not unuseful feeling for a writer. When the precocious Cain, who graduated from college at seventeen, announced to his mother that he, too, wanted to be a singer, Rose told him that he didn’t have the looks, let alone the voice, to make it onstage. Cain repaid her unkindness by distancing himself from her. (In “Mildred Pierce,” Mildred, newly separated from Herbert, interviews for a job as a housekeeper with a snobbish, hypocritical woman, Mrs. Forrester, who was likely inspired by Cain’s feelings about his mother and about his own privileged upbringing.)

One day in 1914, while he was sitting on a park bench in Washington, D.C., Cain heard his own voice telling him that he was going to be a writer. He was twenty-two. For three years, he wrote with no success, while teaching mathematics and English at Washington College. Finally, in 1917, he took a job as a reporter for the Baltimore American and, the following year, for the Baltimore Sun. To sharpen his journalistic eye, he read H. L. Mencken, who became an early mentor and whose cigar-waving directness and contrariness appealed to him. Cain was drawn to the vernacular speech he heard on the streets. As he told his biographer Roy Hoopes, his fascination was no doubt a reaction to “the impeccable grammar of the household in which I grew up.” In a 1977 interview in The Paris Review, Cain elaborated:

I tried to write as people talk. That was one of the first arguments I ever had with my father—my father was all hell for people talking as they should talk. I, the incipient novelist, even as a boy, was fascinated by the way people do talk. The first man I ever sat at the feet of who enchanted me not only by what he told me but how he talked, was Ike Newton, who put in the brick walk over at Washington College. . . . The way he’d use language! I’d go home and talk about it, to my mother’s utter horror, and to my father’s horror, too. . . . My childhood was nothing but one long lesson: not “preventative” but “preventive”; not “sort of a” but “a sort of”; not “those kind” but “that kind” or “those kinds.” Jesus Christ, on and on and on.

By 1931, Cain’s work had attracted some notice, and he was hired as a screenwriter at Paramount. For a gothic sensibility like Cain’s, Los Angeles can be a kind of finishing school: there are weeds sprouting in all the city’s sun-baked cracks. Aside from reporters, no one articulated L.A.’s darkness more brilliantly in the Depression years than screenwriters. Cain griped about the movies his entire life. (After Paramount, he worked at Columbia, M-G-M, and Warner Bros. Among other projects, he contributed to “Algiers,” the 1938 Charles Boyer vehicle, and to “Gypsy Wildcat,” of 1944, starring Maria Montez.) But writing for the screen helped round out his journalistic love of brevity and the lurid, telling detail. In 1933, Columbia let him go; a fellow-screenwriter, Robert Riskin, told Cain that his approach to writing was too mechanical and he’d do better if he could learn to talk about himself and tell his own story. Cain resolved to do so. He had not been allowed to have a voice as a singer, but he was determined to have one as a writer.

At the time, he was close to the legendary screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, whose own speech was as hard and intricate as the dialogue he wrote for such male stars as Clark Gable. In the Hoopes biography, the writer Samson Raphaelson recalls how Lawrence would go into a bar “and there would be a couple and he would look at them fondly and say: ‘You’ve got the moon, ain’t you, pal?’ When you’d offer him a drink, he’d say: ‘Tell me this, pal, why isn’t everybody sitting on a fence in the moonlight playing a banjo? That’s all I want to know.’ ” Lawrence’s voice was colloquial and poetic, like the voices that Cain had loved back East but adapted to a Western context, an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine and wide-open spaces. One day, Lawrence and Cain discussed a notorious murder case from 1927, in which a woman and her lover had bumped off her husband. Cain said, “That jells the idea I’ve had for just such a story; a couple of jerks who discover that a murder, though dreadful enough morally, can be a love story too, but then wake up to discover that once they’ve pulled the thing off, no two people can share this terrible secret and live on the same earth.” The result was “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” an instant best-seller, which helped to establish the genre of literary noir. (The book, which was dedicated to Lawrence, now appears on the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best novels.) The thirty-five-thousand-word piece, which the critic Luc Sante called “a prose poem hallucinated from a potboiler,” had none of the California optimism and joy that readers looked for in John Steinbeck’s or William Saroyan’s works; instead, it burnished its characters’ needy sexual attraction with a rag dipped in spite. The book had what Clifton Fadiman, writing in this magazine, would later call “all the old Cain trademarks: his slightly brutal contempt for his own characters, his interest in violent extremes of conduct, his mastery of cinema-plot tricks, his non-tragic handling of tragedy.”

“Double Indemnity,” published two years later, borrows as much from the conventions of film as “Postman” did. The borrowing was mutual. In 1944, Billy Wilder directed a movie version of “Double Indemnity,” co-writing the screenplay with Raymond Chandler, another noir master. Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis, dominates the film. Her voice seems to rise out of cigarette ash as she brilliantly depicts not a Depression-era housewife trapped by her fear and greed in an unsteady world but a bloodthirsty dame in a grid of tidy supermarkets and flowing freeways. Lana Turner’s Cora in the ice-hot 1946 version of “Postman,” directed by Tay Garnett, wears white and gazes longingly at her own reflection in her lover’s eyes. She’s a postwar creature, limitless in her desire for the kind of stability that Phyllis tries to trade in for even greater riches.

Mildred Pierce is the odd woman out in this gallery of moral ineptitude. Her aspirations are not for herself but for her children; she doesn’t want to be rich so much as she wants them to feel entitled. She’s a great believer in women’s rights, but she knows that, as second-class citizens, women can raise themselves up only through work. Mildred works hard so that Veda can realize her dreams. But Veda is more conventional than her mother and more of a performer; the only audience that interests her is male, and she sets out to upstage her mother with cunning and artifice. (One of the more horrifying scenes in the book is when Mildred, in a moment of rage and frustration, grabs Veda by the throat. Of course, Mildred loves Veda too much to want to hurt her, but Veda uses Mildred’s loss of control to her advantage, falsely asserting that Mildred has damaged her throat and thus her career.) Again and again, Mildred forgives Veda’s transgressions because she believes in her, and in the idea that a woman can triumph over the exigencies of gender through art.

In the HBO miniseries, the preadolescent Veda’s rebellion against her mother’s unaffected, earthy manner is signalled by her girly bows and gummy lipstick. Later, after Veda grows up and becomes a radio star (played by Evan Rachel Wood), Haynes gives her a porcelain pallor and a mannered style of speech. Meanwhile—employing a camera style reminiscent of that of Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk, his great influence—he shows Mildred trapped in a world that is not of her making. Even as she moves in from the margins and marries up (Guy Pearce is excellent as Monty), we see her hemmed in, over and over—framed in windows, in doors, in a windshield—until she is nearly ruined by Veda’s machinations. (The more successful Mildred becomes, the more artificial her environment looks.)

Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film version of “Mildred Pierce” added murder, larceny, and blackmail to the story, the better to capitalize on Cain’s reputation as a crime writer. But, although Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her strong-jawed performance in the title role, it’s Ann Blyth’s depiction of Veda that seems most revealing today. With her tight little mouth and her eyes turned down in disapproval, she captures the social climber’s disdain for the working class, which Haynes, a Los Angeles native, also understands very well. His California is a microcosm of America, with its penchant for producing dreams that only money can buy. But, as Cain knew, with dreams come responsibilities, especially when your dream is to catapult yourself past society’s limited view of your class or your gender. Discussing “Mildred Pierce,” Cain explained, “This book simply says perhaps a dream come true may be the worst possible thing that can happen.” ♦