Dunno why I picked this one, a Warner Brothers black-and-white from 1945. Attitudes are changing with the man drought due to the war. It is a bit strange as the bland 1950s lay just over the horizon when the women here are doing it for themselves.
Joan Crawford is solid, and I haven't seen her in anything else. (Apparently this is her finest.) Her first husband was wooden, and her daughter so totally a 90210 valley girl, too vacuous, but that didn't get in the way of the moderately crap plot, where the mother-daughter relation got stretched out of shape a few too many times.
Mildred's restaurants are so very American — some composite of diner, bar, formal thing... a place where Tom Waits could get a start.