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Starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, "Now, Voyager" was for me a strangely liberating experience. In its time the movie was known as a "weepie," or a "woman's movie." Such has our culture changed, however, that seeing it for the first time now made me, perhaps, see it differently from the way men might have seen it in 1942. I found myself actively disliking all the men in the movie (and Bette's mother, who is much more like a tyrannical father than a mother) and identifying instead with Bette Davis. The men in the movie want to take over the woman's voice. They want to speak her innermost thoughts for her, not understanding how radically wrong they might be. Paul Henreid, who is magnificent in a role that men in the 1940s and 1950s must have thought was one of an infinitely patient and suffering but noble husband (of another woman in the movie, not Bette), is on current viewing the most extreme kind of villain just because he's so damn smooth. With sincere "nobility" at the end he says to Bette that she should be free to marry "some man who will make you happy." Self-sacrifice on his part? No, he thinks SHE is the one who will be undergoing self-sacrifice if she doesn't get married! He says to her, when it is clear that he has made up his mind to go back to his wife and Bette will probably remain a spinster and bring up his daughter, "No self-respecting man would allow such self-sacrifice as yours to go on indefinitely." And I'm sure that male viewers in past decades would think, "yes, his greatest concern is indeed for her." But Bette isn't buying. In the movie she responds, "That is the most conventional, pretentious, pious speech I ever heard in my life. I simply don't know you."
I understand why this unique film has been called one of the greatest, and most unexpected, movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Professor Cavell writes of the films he discusses in his book "Contesting Tears": "There is surely a sense of sacrifice in this group of films; they solicit our tears. But is it that the women in them are sacrificing themselves to the sad necessities of a world they are forced to accept? Or isn't it rather that the women are claiming the right to judge a world as second-rate that enforces this sacrifice; to refuse, transcend, its proposal of second-rate sadness?"
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Amazon Customer
Même si sur l'endos du DVD il indique qu'il y ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 10, 2016
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Reviewed in Canada on June 10, 2016
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MECHTILD KÖRBEL
Es war mir wichtig, dass eine Stornierung stattfand
Reviewed in Germany on September 21, 2020