Now, Voyager (1942)

Now, Voyager is an American romantic film drama first released in 1942, directed by Irving Rapper.  The film stars Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Gladys Cooper and Bonita Granville.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Thanks to her mother’s domineering treatment of her, Charlotte Vale, the youngest child of a wealthy Boston family, has grown up to be a repressed old maid.  At the request of her sister-in-law, Charlotte is visited by the eminent psychiatrist Dr Jaquith, who recommends that she be admitted to his sanatorium.  After a few months in Jaquith’s care, Charlotte is a changed woman, and it is with newfound confidence that she sets off for South America on a pleasure cruise.  Here, she meets and falls in love with Jerry Durrance, a man trapped in an unhappy marriage.  Realising that their affair can go nowhere, they go their separate ways.  Charlotte returns to Boston and is determined not to allow her mother to have the upper hand over her again...

Now, Voyager may justifiably earn the epithet of a high class woman’s weepy, packed with enough high grade schmaltz to sink a flotilla of soap-filled battleships, but its artistic strengths put it in a class of its own, making it one of the all-time classics of Hollywood.   This is far more than a conventional melodrama; it is fundamentally about the power of love to change lives for the better, to defeat the tyranny of loneliness and rejection, through a wondrous spiritual transformation.  

In a role that does justice to her talent and allows her to show her full dramatic range, Bette Davis is magnificent as the ugly duckling spinster who becomes a glamour girl with a heart of gold.   Her measured and intense performance brings several moments of genuinely heart-rending poignancy, and manages to draw our attention away from the many needless contrivances with which the plot is strewn.  Gladys Cooper is almost as memorable as the unflinchingly matriarchal Mrs Vale, although the one-sided nature of her character makes it hard for an audience to have any sympathy for her, which does weaken the dramatic tension in a few places.  Both Davis and Cooper were nominated for Oscars, but the film’s only Oscar win was for Max Steiner’s stirring, highly romantic score.

Bette Davis and Gladys Cooper may rule this particular roost, but there are some pleasing contributions from their attractive male co-stars, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains – who appeared together in Casablanca, released the same year.   The secondary importance of their characters does tend to support the charge that this is a film with a strong feminist subtext, although, to be fair, any film with the charismatic and controlling Bette Davis in it is unlikely to see many male characters hogging the limelight.   

Now, Voyager is perhaps most famous for its final scene, where Henreid lights two cigarettes simultaneously and hands one to Davis as a gesture of their undying love.  There is uncertainty over whether this was scripted or improvised but it is a brilliant touch that helps to make this one of the most alluring and memorable of American film melodramas.

© James Travers 2008

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