NOW, VOYAGER (1942) B/W 117m dir: Irving Rapper

w/Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Bonita Granville, Gladys Cooper, Ilka Chase

This is the very romantic story of a woman who learns independence through the acknowledgment of her capacity for love. Davis is superb (it's FilmFrog's favorite of all her performances) as the overprotected Charlotte, who bravely sails forth on a therapeutic cruise, meets a married continental charmer, and changes the rest of her life. Her metamorphosis is truly amazing, and Davis doesn't disappoint. Henreid, while certainly not a major star nor a typical Hollywood leading man, underplays just enough to give Charlotte the room to grow. But perhaps the most remembered thing about this film is the intimate gesture Henreid performs several times: that of lighting two cigarettes and passing one to Davis; it has become a much-imitated symbol for romantics everywhere. Not a perfect movie but: "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."

From The Movie Guide: "It's Olive Higgins Prouty, at it again (she also penned Stella Dallas, the durable soap opera from which three films, including the Barbara Stanwyck classic, were made), with a title lifted from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a conceit enough to raise a dead poet. Irving Rapper directs as if he wants to stay out of the way of Davis and Cooper --- perfectly understandable.

"As usual, Davis has to overplay her hand at Jekyll/Hyde transformation. Beforehand, she's got unplucked eyebrows like last spring's caterpillars, hair like a mudpuddle with a net over it, and glasses and shoes borrowed from the First Continental Congress. It sets a satisfyingly camp feeling of self-sacrifice over the entire proceedings. Later she is artfully styled; you have the feeling Davis is shedding her own New England repression, which is exactly what she means for you to feel. ...

"Though VOYAGER is best remembered for the scene in which Henreid lights two cigarettes simultaneously and then hands one to Davis, this pleasurable, popular tearjerker is Davis's show all the way. She claimed to have worked extensively on the screenplay, deleting some of Casey Robinson's hard work in favor of Prouty's original words. Cooper is an excellent choice for the matriarchal dowager; Davis always stood in awe (or angry envy) of stage actors, and their scenes have a weight the rest of the picture lacks. Henreid and Rains, both great friends of Davis's (and supposedly Rains was a lover), contribute smooth work. The marvelous Ilka Chase is wasted here, and Bonita Granville is grating. The [Sol] Polito camerawork finally settles down to Davis devotion and [Max] Steiner's Oscar-winning score clings to her like flypaper. It's Grade-A schlock, but not without depth: critics have detected feminist overtones in this movie, one in which men prove eminently dispensable in the quest for happiness."

For example, this article by Dana Polan, taken from the Senses of Cinema website (www.sensesofcinema.com):

"Now, Voyager takes its time to introduce its big star --- Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale --- and by means of the delay, the film demonstrates just how clever and accomplished Hollywood’s art of popular storytelling is. Whatever function the delay has within the narrative, it also serves to show off Hollywood’s control of its fictions by offering a veritable commentary on the thrall and seduction that the star possesses.

"Charlotte is first talked about by others and then she appears as nothing but the image of her ankles waddling tentatively down the stairs. Only eventually is the full face of the actress revealed to us, and even then we’re not given Davis in all her typical vibrant, vivacious splendour but a frumpy and doughy faced version of the woman. The film plays on the connotations of stardom as well as the expectations and emotional needs with which, and for which, we’ve come to such a movie. If the nominal story of Now, Voyager is the fictional one in which, in its content world, Charlotte comes to stand up for herself and emerge as the self-possessed woman she always had the potential to become, the film also tells a second, more meta-reflexive one, in which we see a Hollywood film pretending to not deliver the goods only to then ultimately come through on its initial promise and to do so in a glorious fashion. Whatever else it is about, Now, Voyager is also an allegory about Hollywood itself --- its sheer magic and aesthetic perfectionism.

"Predictably, the film has become a cult classic with citations of, or allusions to, its last scene showing up in works as diverse as, for example, Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam or Alan Bennett’s recent award-winning play The History Boys. In a famous essay (1) Umberto Eco suggested that one quality of the classic cult film was its quotability (his example was another well-crafted narrative of renounced romance from the same year as Now, Voyager, namely, Casablanca [Michael Curtiz]), and Now, Voyager is indeed rich in memorable nuggets of dialogue, choice moments of conflict and/or interpersonal congruence, and scenes redolent in emotional resonance (who can forget the battle of wits when Charlotte returns to her harridan mother and seems to be put in her place through a well-placed verbal jab only to then triumph over the moment and establish her own will?). This is Classical Hollywood filmmaking at its most consummate, and the seeming perfections of the form work well to override any lingering suspicion that the narrative is more than just a bit improbable (for example, Charlotte is dispatched to the same sanatorium that her lover Jerry’s troubled daughter has been sent to). Charlotte’s victory over her initial awkwardness in life is also the film’s triumph over illogic and the incoherence of its plot.

"But, even so, the aura of well-craftedness comes at an ideological cost. Now, Voyager may appear to tell its tale with refinement but the cultural implications of its narrative remain curious. Its formal perfection can only be achieved by leaving something imperfect in the life of its protagonist who ends the film with an act of renunciation. So many of the cult classics of Hollywood are ultimately not about the achievement of romance --- after all, Rick and Ilsa have to part at the end of Casablanca --- but about its being sacrificed in the cause of devotion to a higher mission. Now, Voyager takes the sacrificial structure of 1930s women’s melodramas like Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) --- a woman must give up personal happiness for a greater good --- and updates it to the new context of the 1940s. While there is no explicit reference to the World War II in the film, the very extent to which romance has to be put on hold and to which Charlotte must renounce amorous pleasure for something deeper, is of a piece with the sacrificial demands placed on women in the period of war necessity. Charlotte’s choices --- spinster aunt, vibrant figure of romance, self-abnegating guardian of a young girl --- are presented as incompatible and unbreachable, and they split the woman’s identity into pieces relegated to inviolate realms. But in this respect, the film also anticipates the double bind that American women would face in the postwar period. They would be asked to assume responsibility and agency but this meant surrender to value-laden norms about women’s needs, values, functions and basic worth. Not for nothing has Now, Voyager been the ongoing object of several scholarly analyses, including pointedly feminist ones: in the complexity and complication of the positions it holds out for the woman, it presciently resonates with concerns that are still at play in culture today.

"Endnotes:

"1. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage", Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver, Picador, London, 1987, pp. 197-211."

Article by Patricia White, "Now, Voyager: We Have the Stars," taken from the Criterion website (www.criterion.com):

"In a key scene of the beloved Bette Davis film, Now, Voyager (1942), the heroine goes to dinner on a cruise ship wearing a cloak decorated with fritillaries. A fritillary is a spangled butterfly, and the scene signals that Charlotte Vale, spinster, has emerged from her cocoon. One of "the Vales," of Boston,” Charlotte has been sheltered and stifled to the point of neurosis by her formidable mother (Gladys Cooper). The cruise is the culmination of a rest cure prescribed by the wise Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains); Charlotte is sailing under the name of a family friend, who has lent not only her ticket but also her wardrobe, each item with its own instructions. Charlotte’s grand entrance is marred when Jerry (Paul Henreid), her new friend and unhappily married romantic interest, finds a note pinned to the cloak. Bewildered, he says, 'Somebody must be playing a joke on you.'

"One of several moments of abject humiliation for Charlotte in this Warner Bros. classic, the revelation that her wings are borrowed flips, with the suddenness and grace of a butterfly, into one of several moments of sardonic self-knowledge: 'The joke is far funnier than you realize.' Davis spits the line. As a result of pressure from the Production Code Administration, the consummation of the couple’s relationship is merely suggested: they spend the night 'bundling' when a car accident strands them in the hills above Rio de Janeiro (after an excruciating scene with their Brazilian driver that is meant to provide comic diversion but should have been challenged by the PCA in the name of the Good Neighbor Policy, a key reason for the Latin American setting in the first place). But much more is at stake on this cruise than a pity fuck. A declaration of independence is imminent.

"The combination of proper Massachusetts ladies Ruth Elizabeth Davis and Olive Higgins Prouty --- the author of Now, Voyager, the third in a popular series about the Vales --- results in a deeply satisfying, sometimes harrowing portrait of female capacity (white, New England, bourgeois) and how it is thwarted, symbolized by the butterfly’s short life span and seen in the world’s inability to recognize the heroine’s qualities of discernment and passion. But not the viewer’s inability, for the particular depth of this film is how it entrusts us with aspects of the character’s interiority that no one in the film --- neither Charlotte’s seeming soul mate Jerry nor the beneficent Dr. Jaquith --- can access. This is achieved through moments of reverie that recall the book’s prose ('I was thinking about my mother ...') and narrative focalization. For example, an early flashback functions as a primal scene of maternal prohibition; the teenage Charlotte is ordered to give up a shipboard dalliance. Later, catching a glimpse of her glamorous reflection, Charlotte says aloud: 'He wishes he understood me!” implying that the more pressing enigma is knowing herself. The ferocity of this character’s inner life melds perfectly with the conviction of Davis’s performance.

"Filmed in 1942 on and off the Warner Bros. lot, Now, Voyager is among the best loved of the many classical Hollywood films featuring female stars, adapted from popular women’s fiction, and aimed at female audiences. Studio-era Hollywood always recognized the significance of the female box office, targeting women viewers with fanzines, fashion, and flamboyant emotion. The 'woman’s picture' rose to prominence during the Depression --- often telling stories of class rise, as in the Barbara Stanwyck classic Stella Dallas (1937), also adapted from a Prouty novel. During World War II, the industry aimed its product even more squarely at the women on the home front, with stories whose conventional setups --- thwarted romance, maternal sacrifice, career women chucking it all for love --- gave vent to some uncommonly strong feelings of gender injustice.

"With its memorable closing line, in which Charlotte discloses that she can, in effect, do better than Jerry ('Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars!'); its makeover story arc, in which Davis goes from fat pads and unibrow to cosmopolitan chic; and its painful depiction of mother-daughter dynamics and resultant female emotional precarity, Now, Voyager is for many the quintessential woman’s film. A poignant train-platform farewell during which a camellia corsage wilts in real time; prophylactic smoking --- two cigarettes lit at the same time in the gesture for which the movie is best known --- on a balcony with Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain rear-projected; a mother’s sudden death after quarreling and a daughter’s declaration: 'I did it.' These are a few of Now, Voyager's gasp- and groan-worthy highlights. Stanley Cavell puts the film at the heart of his genre study, Contesting Tears, in which he links the 'melodrama of the unknown woman' to the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau. If anyone lives up to the term self-reliance, it's Davis, and Charlotte is unimaginable without the actress’s animating spirit.

"To be sure, Now, Voyager has received its share of disapprobation and damnation-with-faint-praise from the critical establishment over the years. The contemporary New York Times review concludes: 'Although Now, Voyager starts out bravely, it ends exactly where it started --- and after two lachrymose hours.' Pauline Kael later called Prouty a 'genius of kitsch,' and Carol Burnett aimed her wicked parody at the business with the cigarettes. Dismissals, accompanied in certain cases by grudging acknowledgments of how well this film pulls it all off, remain typical responses to 'women’s genres.'

"Later feminist critics like Jeanne Allen, Maria LaPlace, and Tania Modleski have turned their attention to such taste hierarchies, revisiting Now, Voyager and the genre as a whole. Like most melodramas, the film presents a feminist conundrum. Mrs. Vale is vilified, consistent with Philip Wylie’s vitriolic indictment of American 'momism' in Generation of Vipers, as E. Ann Kaplan points out, also came out in 1942. And Now, Voyager's ending, in which Charlotte selflessly promises to raise Jerry’s daughter, Tina (Janis Wilson), is pathetic, in the word’s true sense (another woman’s picture might tell the story of Jerry’s wife, Isabelle). But the film’s final gesture can also be taken as a feminist statement and even as queer world-building --- rejecting Jerry and men in general, our heroine treats an unwanted girl-child with the respect and companionability lacking in the relationship with her own mother. What does the moon have over the stars, anyway? In real life, Prouty was a benefactor to a young Sylvia Plath; at the very least, the story can be credited with legitimating women’s mental health as a subject of public concern.

"Now, Voyager's duality --- surface 'twaddle,' to use one of Dr. Jaquith’s clinical terms, versus emotional depth --- is not unrelated to the duality in Charlotte Vale herself. Her very surname raises questions of disclosure. Matching staircase scenes show off the character’s transformations. In the film’s opening moments, we await the star’s appearance. Family members assemble in the parlor with Dr. Jaquith, mirroring contemporary audiences soon to be shocked by the 'ugly duckling' styling of Warner’s top star. Details of nervous hands and sensibly clad feet lingering on the steps, as her mother callously defends the matriarchal reign of terror, dare us to treat the full reveal as (only) camp. The second staircase entrance is a shipboard one, when 'Renee Beauchamp' first emerges from her cabin, introduced by a close-up of chic spectator pumps soon to be complemented by a wide-brimmed hat with a literal veil that casts her face, her very identity, in shadow. Ostensibly, the answer to female mental anguish is hetero­sexual romance, weight loss, and cosmetics --- the movie’s product tie-in campaigns urged the female viewer to “sail thou forth to seek and find ... beauty.' But this scintillating creature isn’t the real Charlotte either. Her metamorphosis isn’t complete until she comes into her own power. At the end of the film, Charlotte Vale, confirmed spinster, strides down the stairs of the home she has inherited, windows flung open to the starlight.

"Davis was adept at playing smoldering and stoic. She’d been under contract since 1932, earning her nickname as the 'fourth Warner brother.' Her relationship with the studio was contentious, however; in a high-profile 1937 case, Davis, wanting better roles, sued to break her contract and lost. But in 1942, the actress was on a roll of tour-de-force performances for Warner. She’d already earned two Oscars, for Dangerous in 1935 and Jezebel in 1938, and the nomination she’d get for Now, Voyager would lead to a record five-in-a-row streak. She had settled into a comfortable alternation between sincere heroines and what Molly Haskell and Richard Dyer describe as 'bitch' roles. In The Little Foxes (1941), she stands by, with hooded gaze and set jaw, as husband Herbert Marshall dies. In The Old Maid (1939), she stands aside while Miriam Hopkins raises her daughter (and chews the scenery). As unashamed to play Aunt Charlotte, 'the fat one with the heavy brows and all the hair,' as she would be to play the demented Baby Jane in her postwar career, Davis was an identification magnet for all misfits and unloved children.

"The rest of the film’s cast is splendid too --- Gladys Cooper, hired at director Irving Rapper’s insistence, is a worthy match for Davis’s burning intensity and ironic hauteur. In her Oscar-nominated performance, Cooper intentionally falls down the stairs with aplomb and all but purrs as the redoubtable Mary Wickes, as Nurse Dora, rubs her head. Janis Wilson’s Tina is appropriately cringey (though her vanilla ice cream melts as she mopes about, she may well grow up to have the prodigious appetites of her fairy godmother). Claude Rains is grand as Charlotte’s shrink and confidant, and Paul Henreid debonair as her soft-focus love object; after the film wrapped, the two men immediately went to work on Warner Bros.’ other great melodrama of 1942, Casablanca. A love triangle with Davis, under Rapper’s direction, followed in 1946's Deception.

"From Orry-Kelly’s gowns to the Oscar-winning score by Max Steiner, it all works, a product of what Andre Bazin called the 'genius of the system.' (Steiner would even quote himself in 1945's Mildred Pierce, the Warner Bros. starring vehicle for Davis’s sometimes-rival Joan Crawford.) Apparently, Rapper had told Davis of unit producer Hal B. Wallis’s plan to cast Irene Dunne as Now, Voyager's lead; Davis lobbied for the role and for the relatively untested Rapper as her director. Born in England and with a stage background, Rapper started as a dialogue coach --- helping with Warner’s stable of non-native-English-speaking directors: Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, and Anatole Litvak. The adaptation process on Now Voyager, which would be Rapper’s fourth film behind the camera, was smooth, with Edmund Goulding, Davis's Dark Victory (1939) director, doing the treatment and Casey Robinson --- writing his fifth screenplay for Davis --- drawing liberally on Prouty’s dialogue. Sol Polito’s cinematography flatters Davis in her most successful romantic role and captures intimate drama in the film’s symbolic objects: the eyeglasses, cigarettes, flowers, and hats that Charlotte doesn’t so much hide behind as use to conjure herself into being. Now, Voyager was a box-office success, a clear response to the studio system’s wartime efforts to answer the question that confounded Freud: 'What does a woman want?'

"The thematizing of psychoanalysis in the film is no joke. By the early forties, Austrian and Jewish emigres in Hollywood had already begun contributing shadowy visual styles and psychoanalytic themes to the emergent genre of film noir. While psychiatry was not always shown in a flattering light --- see Cat People (Jacques Tourneur), made the same year as Now Voyager --- here, Jaquith and Cascade are idealized. Prouty based Charlotte’s experience on her own with the eminent Dr. Austen Riggs and his sanatorium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, an institution still at the forefront of residential psychiatric care. (Prouty’s papers are housed at Clark University in Worcester, her birthplace; interestingly, Clark was also the site of Freud’s only U.S. speaking gig, in 1909.) Now, Voyager's hybrid therapeutic ethos may encompass weaving and ocean cruises, but its Oedipal drama is compelling enough to make it an ever-popular film for psychoanalytically informed film criticism and theory. Such themes figure prominently in influential studies of the film by feminist critics Elizabeth Cowie, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, and Lauren Berlant (work Cavell has been accused of ignoring, in a repetition of the gendered authority issues raised by the film itself).

"Although the film bids fare well (vale) to the actual father --- its first image is the family name inscribed on the base of a lawn jockey outside the mansion --- patriarchal authority makes itself felt in other ways. Monstrous Mother Vale hands down edicts while enthroned in a high-backed chair, a strikingly psychoanalytic mise-en-scene for confrontations with her daughter. Camera movements pick out symptoms, tracking in on characters’ facial reactions or fidgeting hands. While many read the pipe-smoking Jaquith as a father figure, or even a potential suitor, he also plays good mother to Mrs. Vale’s bad. In fact, Charlotte is not Now, Voyager's only butterfly: as Richard Corliss suggests and Cowie elaborates, all of its characters flit through multiple psychic positions. Charlotte parents Tina and chooses her as partner, as her mother did her; Jerry is Charlotte’s mirror as well as her lover. Mrs. Vale even invites Nurse Dora, after comparing Charlotte unfavorably with her, to sleep in her husband’s room. What’s wrong with Charlotte? 'Untold want,' as the Whitman poem from which the film’s title is drawn would have it: desires that can’t be named or accounted for.

"Prouty’s resonant stories ennoble maternal sacrifice (and punish overreach); the era’s uneasy response to growing female public power was to mythologize the private sphere, giving audiences something to truly cry over. 'Women owned Hollywood for twenty years,' Davis is quoted as saying in Nobody's Girl Friday, J.E. Smyth’s account of women’s work behind the scenes in studio-era Hollywood. Perhaps this, and the 'fourth Warner brother' nickname, overstates the case. Appointed the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in November 1941, Davis immediately resigned after it became evident that the board had no intention of allowing her to govern. Thwarted, she channeled her energies elsewhere. I can think of no better account of the woman’s picture’s central role in American culture. At least we have the stars."

In addition to Steiner's Oscar for Best Score for a Dramatic Picture (and it's truly marvelous music), NOW, VOYAGER received nominations for Best Actress (Davis) and Supporting Actress (Cooper).