Customer Reviews

Now, Voyager [VHS]

5 star:		(96)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There's nothing campy about "Now,Voyager", style or otherwise. Some people obviously don't understand the difference between classic and camp. This is a wonderful 40's film and one of Bette Davis' most memorable. Based on Olive Higgens Prouty's chronicles of the Bostonion Vale family, it tells of repressed spinster Charlotte Vale breaking free from the mother-from-hell (a marvelous Gladys Cooper) and emerging into an independant modern woman through the help of sympathetic psychiatrist Dr.Jacquith (Claude Rains). When a frustrating relationship with unhappily married Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) and the death of her mother (after a heated argument) almost derails her, she finds purpose and meaning in helping Durrance's emotionally disturbed and neglected daughter Tina (Janis Wilson---overacting just a tad). Henreid's cigarette lighting ceremony with Davis became film legend as did the splendid music score by Max Steiner. There's nothing campy about the screenplay by Casey Robinson either. In fact, it offers one of the loveliest lines ever heard on screen. Spoken by Davis, it's the closing line: "Let's not ask for the moon...we have the stars." What words could be more perfect while gazing up at a nightime sky with your lover? A top notch cast puts this over in divine style. Both Davis and Cooper were nominated for Oscars. Watch for Mary Wickes as Dora the nurse to Mrs.Vale. And please, don't view this lovely film as camp. It's a true classic and a vintage example of good filmmaking. Essential viewing for the film lover. Just enjoy it.

Some movies simply get better with age, much like fine red wine. This is certainly true of "Now Voyager." It is an "ugly duckling" to "beautiful swan" tale--hardly a cutting edge concept--but it works impressively here. Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) seems doomed to a life of dull spinsterhood under the thumb of her domineering mother, the outstanding Gladys Cooper. But a kindly psychiatrist comes along (Claude Rains) who sees potential worth tapping under nervous Charlotte's dumpy exterior. And the transformation is filmed superbly;Bette Davis never looked more glamorous. The first shot of the "new" Charlotte--now traveling under an assumed name on a cruise ship--as she makes her entrance is a moment of monumental film making. Aboard the cruise, Charlotte meets and falls in love with a married man (Paul Henried), and she manages to stay connected to him through his troubled daughter that she finds and helps at Cascade, the very institution that helped bring forth the new Charlotte Vale. There are moments of joy, moments of humor, moments of sadness in this movie. Max Steiner's score is top notch, and Orry-Kelly's costumes could not be better. This film has frequently been singled out as perhaps the best representation of the trends in moviemaking in the 1940's. After viewing it, you will understand why.

With the help of her psychologist, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) breaks lose from the iron grip of her stern and domineering mother (Gladys Cooper). Charlotte loses weight, trims her eyebrows, and finds love with the handsome Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) while on a cruise to Rio.
NOW, VOYAGER is full of that thick, gooey stuff of which impossible melodramas are made - the cruel parent, the ugly duckling child who must wrest herself out from under the suffocating maternal wing so she may blossom into a beautiful swan, etc., etc., etc. Tear-jerking muck is a toxin to my system, and my thumb hung heavy over the `eject' button, ready to zap this one into oblivion.
But Davis, who must be the greatest movie star ever, plays her character free of artifice and false sentimentality. By the time she meets (unhappily) married Henreid on the cruise ship I was totally involved in her story. By the time they parted at the railroad station and she asked "Shall I tell you what you've given me...?" I was reaching for the hankies.
What a remarkable actress was Bette Davis.

I caught this film late one evening when BBC2 was doing a run on black and white classics. All I can say is "what a little gem of a movie." I am not normally the love story type of person, but this film made me reach for the Kleenex box on more than one occasion. Bette Davis was superb as the repressed Charlotte Vale living with an overbearing mother, (Gladys Cooper at her nasty best) slowly being driven toward a nervous breakdown. Enter a kindly psychiatrist Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains)who teaches the unhappy Charlotte that life is for living and sets her off on a voyage of self-discovery. Charlotte falls in love of course, with the handsome Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) but he is unhappily married so all they can have is a gentle love affair that will surely break both their hearts. However it is Charlotte's love for Jerry that enables her to defy her mother and make a life for herself outside of the family home. Even though she and Jerry can't be together, Charlotte can help Jerry's trouble daughter Tina who has suffered the same fate as Charlotte, being a child her mother does not want. There are many memorable scenes, everyone remembers Jerry lighting two cigarettes at the same time and the words "Don't ask for the moon we have the stars" but my favorite scene is Charlotte remembering her youth and a rare boat trip with her mother when she falls in love for the first time, and that love is reciprocated. The young actor (I can't remember his name) who plays that brief love interest bought tears to my eyes, as did the innocent quality of Charlotte's love as her blossoming passion for this young man is crushed beneath her mother's cruel reign. Now Voyager is one of those films you can watch again and again, and the soundtrack is equally as addictive. I'm so glad this is film is now on DVD because I have practically worn out my tape watching it so many times. Worth the Kleenex value alone if you want a real weepie to munch popcorn by.

Look. I *love* "Now Voyager."

I don't love it as a guilty pleasure, or as camp, or as an example of filmmaking from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I don't love it as a soap opera or as example of the long lost genre, the theatrical-release, big budget, "woman's picture."

I love "Now Voyager" as a movie. "Now Voyager"'s quality could stand comparison with any great film out there. If I walked into a mainstream release theater today and saw, "Now Voyager" I would consider myself as having spent my movie dollars wisely.

"Now Voyager" is, simply, a great film.

Plot: Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis), the psychologically abused child of a sadistic iceberg of a wealthy, Boston Brahmin mother (Gladys Cooper), thanks to the intervention of a compassionate sister-in-law (Ilka Chase) is packed off to a posh asylum, where Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) restores her to well being.

Charlotte loses weight, loses her glasses, and receives tutoring in how to dress and carry herself. Superficially quite the glamor puss, she goes on a cruise and charms Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) an unhappily married architect.

Circumstance intervenes and Jerry and Charlotte enjoy a brief affair. As time goes on, they make some heart-wrenching decisions about how to handle their adulterous love; along the way, Charlotte, once an unloved daughter herself, forms an important bond with Tina, Jerry's daughter, whose mother does not love her.

The screen is full of women's bodies, women's voices, women's choices, and women's lives. There are old women -- Mrs. Vale, for example -- middle aged women, and young women. There are good and bad women in every class. For example, while Tina is the sweet but unnattractive and lost young woman, Bonita Granville, as June Vale, is a pretty, blonde, young b----. The scenes in which June, without censure from any quarter, uses her youth and prettiness to torment her pathetic spinster aunt are terrific, honest, and cruel.

The plot is built around the issues of which women's lives are built: their relationships with their mothers, or mother figures, both good and evil; how the world treats women based on how women look -- Charlotte is treated one way when she is unnattractive and quite differently when she learns to master her appearance -- even though she is the same person under the skin; women's competitions with, and support of, other women; what women do to survive economically and emotionally.

The scenes between Charlotte and Tina are stunning in their sensuality. Tina, the daughter-surrogate, and Charlotte, the mother-figure, cling to each other in bed at night, and while sleeping under the stars on a camping trip; Tina sobs tears that wet her face; Charlotte strokes Tina's hair, and Tina clings to Charlotte's bosom.

The simple message here is how incredibly important parenting is in the lives of both children and mothers, and how a person who has suffered -- Charlotte -- can often be a better person than those who have had it easier -- Mrs. Vale and June, and how having been handed a life that denies you love doesn't make it impossible for you to go out and find love on your own, to create your own family.

The scenes between Charlotte and her own mother, Mrs. Henry Windle Vale, are utterly brutal. Mrs. Vale is one of the most naked depictions of a child abusing mother ever committed to the screen. No, there are no graphic scenes of abuse, but the film never lets you believe that this woman is anything but a nightmare who damaged her child for life while the world let her get away with it because of her money.

Again, the abuse is not graphic, but it is made certain. In one brilliant scene, Charlotte has returned to her mother's house after being out in the world and, for the first time in her life, experiencing some affection, joy, and confidence.

Charlotte speaks in her new voice, a voice of self possession. But she is trying to be nice to her mother, and her voice quavers a bit, without losing its ground.

Charlotte is out of camera range; we hear her, but do not see her. Her mother's back is to the camera. She is motionless -- except for her bejeweled, claw-like hand, which taps rhythmically against a carved bed post. One thinks of a cat waiting to pounce. One realizes that all that is going through Mrs. Vale's head is, "How do I destroy her this time?" That motion alone renders the scene both chilling and telling.

Charlotte's love affair with Jerry Durrance is equally complex. This is no "soap opera" as some reviews here dismiss it as. Viewers are so caught up with Jerry's (Henreid's) trick of lighting two cigarettes at once that they miss the depth, power, and complexity of this relationship.

"Now Voyager" gives us a terribly convincing portrait of two people who really love each other, and whose love is apparently doomed. Jerry is a superficially charming, nice guy whose unhappy marriage has given him reason to see beneath the surfaces of life; he's no rocket scientist, though, so he's not as smart as he could be. He is attracted to a superficially glamorous woman whose secret past as an ugly duckling and abused child gives her a hidden side. For both, society demands that they present a pleasant facade, but pain has caused them to develop in ways that many people never do. Their love is real.

Jerry is deep enough to be attracted, but not deep enough to realize, as soon as he might, how much his acting on his attraction could pontentially devastate Charlotte, a woman whose hold on her life is tenuous, at best.

Whether their love can ever be realized, or whether it would continue to grow outside of the confines of an adulterous affair begun on a cruise ship and consummated after the most outlandish interventions of fate on a mountain road, is a question viewers can still debate to this day. What is clear is that this love is real, and its stakes are terribly high. Charlotte's whole life hangs in the balance here, no less so than a Scorcese hero's life hangs in the balance given how he handles his weapon.

Oh, for the world where women's lives are taken seriously, and films like this would get their due for the works of art they are, and not jokily dismissed as "camp."

Bette Davis is stunning. She *is* Charlotte Vale. Paul Henreid is terrific as the "nice guy" with a suave exterior and an interior you'd never guess at if you judged him on his spotless suit and expertly creased fedora. Claude Rains is solid as Charlotte's best hope at the beginning, and, perhaps, also at the end of the movie. The film's black and white images have the crispness and sheen of the best of Golden Age films. The score is haunting and perfectly matches the plot.

An irresistible kitsch classic which lingers in the memory: if it were any better, it might not have worked at all. This movie offered Bette Davis every opportunity to display her dramatic range, and she took full advantage of the situation. As Miss Charlotte Vale, the drab, myopic, overweight, sexually repressed ugly duckling daughter of a domineering Back Bay matriarch, Davis conveys the loneliness, anger and self-pity felt by someone in her situation. While on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Charlotte is rescued by a kindly psychiatrist, one Dr. Jacquith (the great Claude Rains), who was informed of Charlotte's dilemma by her sophisticated but kind sister-in-law, Lisa. Later, she is transformed into a swan - by comparison, anyway - who finds independence and defies her monster of a domineering mother (magnificently played by Gladys Cooper). A family friend, Renee bowed out of a South American cruise; Charlotte goes in her place. During the cruise, Charlotte meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid, in a polished, understated performance) an unhappily married man: romance ensues. I remember watching this as a teen-ager and thought it was unbelievably phoney: it grows on the viewer with each viewing. Memorable moments are many: Charlotte's bitchy neice (Bonita Granville) commenting on Aunt Charlotte's ravishing "new" dress -Mrs. Vale responding to her daughter's cheeky answers after taking her "cure" i.e. "You know perfectly well what I meant. What PERSON sent the flowers?" - Charlotte's dismissal of her unbearably priggish suitor (the wooden John Loder): "Let's not linger over it" -and the sometimes mawkish scenes with the seemingly purposely annoying - and, boy, did she succeed - Tina as played by the obnoxious & unpretty Janis Wilson. And then there's the weinie roast, where brother Lloyd states a that a certain fireplace has never been used: "High time it was then, Lloyd!" & upon her introduction to an admirer who jilted her years earlier - on why they "never met before": "Well, the world's a small place, but Boston's a big one". A grand movie in every sense of the word, because it belongs entirely to LaDavis, that living acting school whose performances - brilliant as they are - always call attention to them. That's why she was easy to imitate and ended up imitating herself: she was - for this reason - the quintessential movie actress, a point too many aspiring actors ignore at their peril. The Max Steiner score, justifiably famous, effective and admired adds a lush background to the emotional turmoil on the screen. Davis's most popular film of the 1940's.

Never thought of as being a drop dead beauty Bette Davis proves she truly was in this film. Now Voyager paints Davis as the comlpete package; they give her brains and an atitude of self assurance that just won't quit! But for one of the rare times in a film staring Davis. Davis' self assuredness is not the act of inner happiness but inner turmoil. After being denied true love in her younger days by an over protective mother Davis'grows sheltered and has a nervous breakdown only to be nutured by Claude Rains who turns Davis into an opulunet dame of society with a heart of gold or in other words her true self. With her new mindset Davis soon finds her self in love Paul Henreid but their love can not be Henreid is married and has a child who is in the same position Davis once found her self in. This is when the film flies. To see Davis turn in a magnificent portrait of an everyday woman turned mysterious lover is to watch one of the greatest performances on celluloid. The whole look of the film is mesmerizing it looks like a foggy dream as if Davis is still frumpy and unloved but living out a fantasy in her head with handsome men, amazing glamour (thanks to drop dead gowns by O. Kelly)and jewels. The last hour is hearbreaking as Davis turns into the parent that truly loves Henreid's daughter. The one bonds besides Davis' and Henreid's love that intertwines them. A film of this ilk has yet to be recreated and never will because a woman of Better Davis beauty will never exist again!

I have tried to concisely write a review several times for this wonderful movie and it always becomes far too long. In the world of Bette Davis movies, this ranks up there in the Excellent category with "Mr Skeffington". Perhaps there is something in the presence of Claude Rains? His first moment in the film is him tapping his pipe on one of Mrs Vale's ornate vases. There was something so natural and funny about it somehow that my interest was caught immediately. I don't know why.

Other good moments: The way Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale entered the picture. First there is a shot of her hands carving on a little box; then the butler calls her, and she furtively disposes of a few half-smoked cigarettes before we watch her sensibly shod feet moving down the stairs with slow, deliberate steps. Besides her shoes, all we can see is the hem of a highly unbecoming skirt. And all we can hear is Mother downstairs, speaking to Dr Jaquith about Charlotte.

And after Charlotte's sojourn at the sanitarium (which is neither surrounded by barbed wire nor filled with howling inmates, as Mother had threatened it would be) it is amazing to see the transformation that has taken place in her when you see her on the ship going on a pleasure cruise. Because she has taken the cabin of the relative lady's classy friend Renée Beauchamp, who cancelled her ticket at the last minute, the people on the ship all assume she is Miss Beauchamp, and treat her accordingly. Within five minutes the Man in Charge (who looks curiously similar to the Cowardly Lion) comes up to Charlotte with a man, an Ordinary American Tourist who is travelling alone, and the Man in Charge asks if they would be willing to share a carriage. Remembering her mother's negative attitudes towards Ordinary American Tourists, and Dr Jaquith's advice to mingle with people and get involved in the lives of others, Charlotte smiles and says she would be happy to accompany him. "Splendid," says the Man in Charge. "Splendid, splendid." Somehow he sounds curiously similar to the Cowardly Lion as well.

Then in Rio, she and Jerry hire an "English-spoking" chauffeur to take them around the countryside. Unfortunately, about the only English this man can spoke is, "Yes, Senhor, banana-trees!" And Senhor Banana-Trees leaves the main road for a definitely less-travelled byway which snakes precariously over cliffs and clings to its mother-hill so closely that there is scarcely width enough to drive - much less turn around. I have been on roads such as these, and roads such as these have one other particular characteristic. There is never a guardrail. When they crash into a ditch trying to turn around, Senhor Banana-Trees exits the car first, frantically calling heavenward for help, a-weepin' and a-wailin' over the demise of his car. Jerry and Charlotte come out next, but their efforts to communicate with the dear Senhor are fruitless, and they are left behind to find a place to sleep in some rural Brasilian shack.

I thought Tina was a very sweet little girl, genuinely grateful for all that Charlotte was doing for her, and to see her so happy at the end was very nice. I also thought it was nice that Jerry stayed with his wife like a good husband should rather than divorce her and marry Charlotte. Mother was genuinely vicious - a villain in every sense of the word, her true character masked to the outside world by her social status, civility, and money. And Dr Jaquith was a very nice understanding doctor. Why can't there be characters like this in movies today? Why can't there be ACTORS like this in movies today? Oh well. To use one of the most corny parting shots ever - let's not reach for the moon we have the stars. Even if they are all in the past, they're well-preserved on the screen for us forever.

NOW VOYAGER is one of Bette Davis' greatest screen vehicles. It's a tender love story, taut psychological drama and inspiring tale of physical and spiritual transformation. It runs neck-and-neck with DARK VICTORY as Davis' greatest performance.

Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) is a lonely and repressed spinster living with her cold and domineering mother (Gladys Cooper). Her kind sister-in-law (Ilka Chase), fearing that Charlotte is headed for a complete breakdown, sees no other option than to bring Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains) to the house to inspect the situation. Jaquith takes Charlotte back to his secluded estate Cascades where she recovers.

When Charlotte travels abroad after her discharge, she meets the handsome but very-much married Jerry (Paul Henreid) and embarks on an affair. Charlotte then returns home alone, but soon finds herself back in Jerry's life when his troubled daughter Tina ends up at Cascades during Charlotte's relapse. Charlotte helps Tina recover and regain her life, and in turn, Tina helps Charlotte rediscover her romance with Jerry.

The DVD includes music scoring sessions and the trailer.

Solid-gold Bette! One of my favorite movies. Davis and Henreid make the perfect 40s couple; his lighting of two cigarettes and handing one to her was shocking for the time and still erotic today. Claude Rains as the understanding therapist makes the perfect accompaniment to their romance.

Movies like this just aren't made anymore. Today this would star Julia Roberts and Kevin Costner and end in a happy mush. A true woman like Bette Davis knows what it's like to love and sacrifice. A fitting summming up of this cinema classic is Davis' final line, "Oh, Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars!"