Now, Voyager

At the height of WWII, Hollywood produced a lot of excellent melodramas. These were the vehicles the studios created for its stars of that era. It was either a Joan Crawford picture, or a Barbara Stanwyck, or a Bette Davis one, since their presence, bigger than life, was the only reason to bring these stories to the big screen.

Take this one, for instance, under the direction of Irving Rapper. It had all the right elements, yet it was chaste enough to pass the censor. Undoubtedly, this movie owes a lot to the fantastic score by the talented Max Steiner who was a genius. Mr. Steiner's music plays the haunting melodies with such flair, we feel we are listening to a great symphonic work.

The story, by today's standards wouldn't raise an eyebrow. At the time it came out, it was a different thing. After all, Jerry was a married man with a daughter and a situation that had no easy solution then. That makes Charlotte Vale suffer after she found her soul mate aboard the ship that served to free herself from a despotic mother.

Bette Davis plays Charlotte to perfection. Her scenes with Paul Hendried lighting the two cigarettes is something to cherish by film fans. The chemistry that Bette Davis shared with her leading men was no small accomplishment. She was an actress that knew how to pull the heart strings of the general public. She had such a charisma and power to lose herself in all those strong women she played through the years. The transformation of the plain Charlotte to the smart woman, who embarks on a tour to begin a new life, is something out of a fairy tale, but Ms. Davis pulls it with great panache.

The rest of the cast was excellent. Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper, Bonita Granville, Ilka Chase! They only come once in a lifetime. No one in present day Hollywood comes near to that. It was perfection.

This was surprisingly good. I say "surprising" because I am not a man who likes soap operas and that's what I expected here from everything I had read about this film. The only reason I obtained it was that it was part of a 3-pack Bette Davis collection and I wanted a DVD of "The Letter."

Well, this turned out to be a very interesting and gratifying story. No, I still didn't like the corny - and adulterous (which Hollywood loves to glamorize) - love affair between Davis and married man Paul Henreid. However, I did enjoy the ugly duckling-turned-beauty story that featured Davis tolerating her nasty mother and then using her experiences to help another young lady who was suffering from a similar inferiority complex.

Gladys Cooper was outstanding as the irritating, brutal mother. Janis Wilson was the young girl helped in the end by Davis. Wilson overacts something fierce but the message is so nice and the sentimentality so caring that you put up with the kid's performance.

Claude Raines also was likable as the psychologist. He had a number of good lines in this film. The movie was nicely filmed and looks particularly good on the DVD transfer with attractive grays completing the black-and-white.

After seeing this great film, I realized that not every mother wants the best for her children.

Gladys Cooper gave a brilliant performance as the outrageously domineering mother. Her best supporting actress nomination was well deserved. It's a pity she lost the coveted award to Teresa Wright, the tragic daughter-in-law in "Mrs. Miniver." Obviously, Oscar voters could not bring themselves to vote for such a wicked mother that Cooper portrayed. (The following year Cooper gave another brilliant performance as the wretched nun in "Song of Bernadette." She lost the Oscar because who would vote for a vicious nun?)

No words are adequate to describe the outstanding Bette Davis performance in this film. Sorry, Greer Garson, Bette deserved this Oscar as she did so many. Her change from a hopelessly-drawn spinster to a ravishing beauty with all its torment can never be forgotten.

Thank you Claude Rains for your excellent portrayal of the psychiatrist.

In the 1942 screen adaptation of the 1941 bestseller by Olive Higgins-Prouty, Bette Davis and Paul Henreid provide excellent, subtle performances as Charlotte Vale (self-described Spinster Aunt) and J.D. (Jerry) Durrance, the married man she meets, befriends, and with whom she falls in love on a cruise following a transformative stay at the Vermont Sanatorium operated by Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). Reviewers often speak of the themes of self-sacrifice and relate it to the war, which would have been an attractive reason to make the film, but the reality was that the novel was a popular best-seller, Higgins-Prouty's earlier novel, Stella Dallas, was also a popular film (and later a radio series), and the studio stood to do well financially if the movie turned out well. Hal Wallis' deft hand as producer is seen here, especially in his choice of Orry Kelly as costume designer for Bette Davis. He and the studio worked within the limits of censors' requirements, which indicated that there could be no intimation that the two main characters had sex (which was implicit in the novel but never explicitly stated, where the behavior between the two in the love scenes were generally glossed over most of the time), and that they could not share the same blanket in the scene where they are in a hut on a Brazilian mountain, stranded. They also had to change locales for the story, because the novel had the sea voyage set in and around Italy, Gibralter, etc. In spite of any restrictions placed on the filmmakers and actors, the film followed the novel very closely, especially with respect to dialogue. The big point of contention has always been: who invented the two-cigarette lighting gesture that Paul Henreid became famous for later? According to some, George Brent and Bette Davis did something similar earlier in another film, and according to Paul Henreid and Bette Davis, there was a cigarette exchange ritual in the script which was sort of awkward, so they improvised based on Paul Henreid's experience with his wife on car trips. The latter seems likely, as there was a cigarette-exchange ritual in the novel (Jerry would give Charlotte a cigarette, lighting hers and then his own on one match, and then they would exchange cigarettes with each other so that Charlotte smoked the one that had been in Jerry's mouth and vice versa), which would have been slightly awkward in practice.

All in all, this is a truly excellent film with great production values, true to the novel on which it was based, and a wonderful ensemble cast.

"Now, Voyager" is arguably one of the best of all motion pictures by Bette Davis. As Charlotte Vale, a rich Bostonian smothered by a mother who had her late in life, Davis plays a frumpy, low-esteemed, near recluse of a woman. That is, until her cousin intervenes by bringing a psychiatrist, Dr. Jacquith (Claude Rains) into Miss Vale's life.

Miss Vale's cousin and shrink conspire to bring her out of the steel shell her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper) has encased her within. Their idea is to send her on a cruise with the doctor's advice to learn everything, do everything, engage everyone. The results are a remarkable transformation of a woman who believed she was an 'ugly duckling' into Miss Bette Davis as a sizzling hot beauty like she never was before or after in any other film.

How Miss Davis didn't view herself as a beauty or use her beauty to create her success as an actress is what "Now, Voyager," proves is most remarkable about her 66 year long acting career. If she had wanted to be a "bombshell," she could have, two snaps up. Davis didn't want to be a "movie star," or "glamor girl." She wanted to be a great actor and achieved her life's goal. Not only did she make her career using acting skill and shrewd business finesse, Bette Davis also made quite a few other people's acting careers work well for them by taking a back seat in films with her role having a weaker script. Thus, as co-actors they could collaborate to make out of an average screenplay a screen hit and a new acting star. Davis was so unselfish an actor that she was in the acting business to benefit the art. That's why she's my favorite actor of all time: she was so self-assured as an actor in a man's world (in the 20th century), that her ego didn't get in the way of making truly great movies with co-actors with whom she worked with as a team player. "Now, Voyage," is one such film. Clearly, she steals the show, but she takes Paul Heinried (love interest, Jerry) right next to her, conjoined at the hip. What a delight it must have been to work with a true artist who was a great expert at her craft.

Bogie & Bergman in "Casablanca," don't have one thing over Davis & Heinreid in "Now, Voyager," when it comes to the most intense, well acted, extremely well scripted romantic drama that has it all. Davis is glamorous beyond compare and Heinreid is a smooth, sensuous, suitor.

This is my favorite of all of her motion pictures (at least I believe I own and have seen them all). How anyone could say that Bette Davis wasn't a raving beauty after they saw her in this film is beyond me. Not only does "Jerry" fall madly in love with "Charlotte," so does audience after audience, generation after generation.

There's much more to this great story, but I'm not telling! Buy the DVD.