![]() The film was a step in the right direction of Davis’s determination to shape her artistic future while under contract at Warner. ![]() Max Steiner’s score, which fits the text and Davis’ performance like a silk glove, won the Oscar Award. The harshest, most enjoyable scene is arguably the one in which Charlotte dismisses her priggish suitor (John Loder) with the line: “Let’s not linger over it.”Ī must-see for Bette Davis fans, alongside “Jezebel,” “The Old Maid,” “Dark Victory,” The Letter,” “The Little Foxes,” and “All About Eve.” In one, Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and tenderly hands one to Davis, who then says: “Don’t ask for the moon–we have the stars.” Several lines from “Now, Voyager” have entered into movie lore, quoted by Davis fans. Skeffington, and Deception ) was her favorite co-star. In her 1987 memoir, This ‘N That, Davis revealed that co-star Claude Rains (with whom she also shared the screen in Juarez, Mr. Henreid uses the familiarity of sharing a cigarette, with the famous two-cigarette scene, being used as his introduction to a lonely woman.ĭavis was not pleased with the initial tests of Austrian-born actor Paul Henreid, claiming that the “slicked back” appearance made him look “just like Valentino.” Davis insisted on another screen test, with more natural hairstyle, until Henreid was embraced as an optimal screen lover. Prouty borrowed her title from Walt Whitman’s poem, “The Untold Want”: The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.” It’s therefore no coincidence that both novels deal with female self-sacrifice, or masochism. Scenarist Casey Robinson adapted to the big screen the 1941 novel of Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Stella Dallas, which adapted to the big screen in several versions, the best of which is still Barbara Stanwyck’s 1937 film. Jacquith (Claude Rains), a kind, benevolent psychiatrist, helps a sexually repressed, neurotically dowdy Bostonian woman named Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) to become an attractive, confident woman, defying the wish of her strong-willed and domineering mother (Gladys Cooper). In this variation of the Cinderella story (the ugly duckling who’s transformed into a swan), Dr. This weepie, as the genre was labeled then, was extremely popular when it was released in 1942, during the War, largely appealing to housewives who stayed home and went to the movies while the men were fighting. They don’t make them anymore: Under the assured helm of Irving Rapper, “Now, Voyager” is a superior soap opera, an unabashedly kitschy melodrama grandly acted by Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Gladys Copper and Paul Henreid.Ī classic mother-daughter melodrama that’s simple irresistible.
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