Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT NOW, VOYAGER From 6th August Don’t see Now, Voyager (1942) if you’ve got mummy problems. Bette Davis gives a masterclass as Charlotte Vale, the ugly duckling repressed by her horrible, Boston Brahmin mother. Helped by a doctor (Claude Rains) and her love interest on a South American cruise, Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), Vale blossoms into a confident swan. What a marvellous actress Davis is! And here she’s at the height of her powers – nominated for an Oscar for this performance, as she was for Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), and winning an Oscar for Jezebel (1938). Davis was 34 at the time but she convincingly plays the lovely teenage Vale before she’s turned by Mummy into a prematurely middle-aged, fat, monobrowed frump and then magically becomes the dazzling glamourpuss you see in the film poster (pictured above). With her enormous eyes nervously darting all over the place and that voice – acid irony laced with weariness – she comes across as entirely natural and extremely modern. Many of the cast look pretty creaky by comparison. Only 15 years after the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), they still move and talk in a wooden way. Even Henreid, despite his charming Austrian accent and distinguished but unflashy looks, is a bit am-dram. The only actor who comes close to Davis’s heights is Rains as the sardonic, understated Dr Jaquith, who saves Vale from her tyrannical mother. Rains is highly reminiscent of his role as Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942) – not 62 The Oldie August 2021
‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon’: Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942)
surprising since he started filming Casablanca the day after finishing Now, Voyager. Some of the same furniture and jewellery was used for both films. The movie has its faults. At just under two hours, it’s too long – but then attention spans were longer in 1942. There are some schmaltzy scenes when Vale helps Jerry’s daughter go through the same ugly-duckling-toconfident-swan transformation she herself went through. And the supposedly comic scene where Davis and Henreid talk to an idiot cab driver in broken English produces zero laughs. The chemistry between Davis and Henreid never really comes alive, either, even in the famous scenes when Henreid lights two cigarettes and gives her one – XXX-rated these days for promoting tobacco and breaking COVID rules. Casablanca’s romance crackled more because Humphrey Bogart sizzled with
Ingrid Bergman whereas Henreid never really warmed up in either film. The script, too, by Casey Robinson, is sometimes a little flat and highfalutin literary – taken as it is from Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel Now, Voyager (1941). But then again, it is Prouty’s novel that provides the pleasing, twisting, turning plot – and the clever Walt Whitman lines Dr Jaquith gives to Vale: ‘The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted/Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.’ This becomes Vale’s credo, as she breaks out from her mother’s grotesque grip to become interested in everything and everybody. You can see why the critics turned their noses up at the film. But you can also see why wartime audiences loved its escapist high romance – it was Davis’s biggest box-office hit. The film’s last – and most famous – scene was lampooned in The History Boys (2006). Alan Bennett’s schoolboys, smoking like chimneys, wrongly put on Celia Johnson cut-glass English accents to imitate Davis saying, ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’ With most other actresses, that would sound unbearably corny. When Davis says it, you melt.
‘You can be honest – this bag doesn’t go with this dress, does it?’
