I have been watching Bette Davis movies for spring and clearly, it is stretching a bit into summer.
This week I am writing about Now, Voyager — a movie that chronicles the life of a mentally abused woman whose narcissistic mother held her back and down for years.
It was released in 1942, which was in an era where movies were being geared toward women, left home during World War II. It was a feminist-yet-not-feminist movie that was ahead of its time in some ways and right in line with the times in others.
Bette portrays Charlotte Val, an abused woman who only escapes the horror of her mother (Gladys Cooper) when a psychiatrist named Dr. Jaquith (portrayed by Claude Rains) sees what is happening and suggests Charlotte come to a sanatorium. His hope is to unravel the neurotic mess caused by her domineering mother.
This movie starts with Bette looking very dowdy and old, with a unibrow. Online, it also says she was overweight but…well, that wasn’t what I think of as overweight. Different standards back then, of course.
We learn right off the bat that Charlotte’s mother is a domineering, crazy lady. Charlotte has three older brothers and was the “unwanted child” that her mother felt was a burden.
Charlotte’s sister-in-law, Lisa, (Ilka Chase) brings Dr. Jaquith to meet Charlotte, and I can’t help feeling she did this to try to help Charlotte escape her mother.
Ilka also has a teenage daughter (Bonita Granville, who was also in the old Nancy Drew movies) who laughs at her spinster aunt. She is not a lovely girl, but she does improve somewhat later on.
When Charlotte leaves the sanitorium — thinner, more beautiful, and full of more confidence than when she went in — Dr. Jaquith and Lisa suggest she delay her return to her mother and instead go on a cruise, which she does. There she meets Jerry (Paul Henreid), who is on a business trip, and who she falls in love with but soon learns is married, though unhappily. They end up pushed together a lot on this trip, and when they are involved in a car crash while going to see the sights on a stop in Rio de Janeiro, they spend the night together, cuddling (maybe more? Hmmm…), and then spend five days together after missing the ship.
Charlotte eventually catches up with the ship to return home after she and Jerry admit they can’t be together because of his marriage.
This movie was very good, suspenseful and fascinating, but I am going to share one annoyance for me — and please keep in mind that this was most likely a me issue and is probably due to some sensory overload issues I’ve been having as I get older — the music that constantly plays in the background of every single scene and never lets up was very distracting for me. I hesitate to even share this lest one of the enthusiastic Bette fans who have found my movie clips on social media come here and berate me, but the music, while very good, was very distracting for me. Maybe it was the sound on my TV? I have no idea.
I searched online to see if this bothered anyone else and it did (thank you Reddit and other forums), but I also read that this was to set the mood of the movie and to show how intense things kept getting for Charlotte throughout various stages of her breaking away from her mother.
That makes sense, but it was no less annoying for me. At times, I had trouble concentrating on the dialogue because of how prevalent the music was. It was a 2-hour movie and the music never, or at least rarely, stopped. The score, composed by Max Steiner, won an Oscar, though, so this is apparently just a “me” issue.
Like many of Bette’s movies, Now, Voyager is a melodrama, and melodramatic music is to be expected.
The blog The Hollywood Garden shared that Steiner scored 21 of Bette’s movies; she was a huge fan of his. Rightly so. The music is great — just a bit too great in some scenes where it was more prominent than the voices to me.
“In 1939, during the making of Dark Victory (dir. Edmund Goulding), Bette stopped the climactic scene and asked Goulding if Steiner was going to score the picture,” The Hollywood Garden wrote. “He said he didn’t know and asked what the big deal was. She famously said, ‘Either I’m going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is going to climb those stairs. But I’ll be g******** if Max Steiner and I are going to climb those stairs together!’”
But, as usual, I have digressed a bit. Let’s get back to the rest of the movie.
From the first moment that Dr. Jaquith takes Charlotte from her mother’s home, I was rooting for her.
I was hoping she would break away, tell that old bitty to jump off a bridge, and start her own life. Some of this did happen, but then Charlotte was in a new cage — one of a mistress who can’t really have the man she wants because he’s already married with children. Ironically, one of his children, a daughter, is very similar to Charlotte and is treated as poorly by her mother as Charlotte was by hers.
That will come into play in the movie, of course.
Bette showed her true range in this film. I almost forgot she was Bette. Instead of being brash and bold and yelling, like she was in many of her other films, she was withdrawn, subdued, quiet, and confused during the beginning of Now, Voyager, with a later transformation into a bold and determined woman.
It was fascinating to watch the process of where Charlotte started and where she eventually ended up.
I’ve almost forgotten to mention that this movie is based on the book by Olive Higgins Prouty. It was the third novel in a series about the wealthy Vale family of Boston and was released in 1941.
Bette was not the first choice for this film, which was directed by Michael Curtiz after the first director, Edmund Goulding, became ill.
Warner Bros. Production Head Hal Wallis first looked to Irene Dunne, who had starred in another melodramatic film, Love Affair, with Charles Boyer, a couple of years before. Also considered were Norma Shearer and Ginger Rogers.
None of those women were available in the end, and Bette was in the middle of yet another blow-up and battle with Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros.
When a friend at the studio told Bette that the rights had been obtained to Prouty’s novel, though, she began to lobby for the role. She was a native Bostonian and would understand the role more than other actresses, she said.
Warner said Bette wasn’t attractive enough to go from an ugly duckling to a glamorous woman.
Bette countered that her modest appearance would appeal to all women around the nation instead of a Hollywood beauty, and Wallis agreed, thus convincing Warner to cave and give her the role.
One famous scene or recurring action that came in this film was when Paul Henreid lit two cigarettes in his mouth and handed one to Bette’s character. It was a move that followed Paul around for years afterwards, with fans offering to light his cigarettes that way.
I rented this one, but I believe it is streaming on various sites.
After I finish one more Bette Davis movie, The Petrified Forrest, I’ll be taking a break from a set movie/actor theme until Autumn, when I will be watching Jimmy Stewart movies.
The movies I’ve watched for this feature include:
Now, Voyager
The Petrified Forrest
You can find a suggestion of Bette Davis movies to watch here.
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Sources or further reading:
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6703-now-voyager-we-have-the-stars
https://theoldhollywoodgarden.wordpress.com/2021/08/14/max-steiner-and-now-voyager-1942/
https://www.tcm.com/articles/1074847/now-voyager
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