A wealthy young woman escapes her tyrannical mother to fall hopelessly in love in this magnificent
Hollywood melodrama
The towering 1942 romantic melodrama Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid has been re-released, and its audiences will once again get swept away in the emotional
tsunami created by Max Steiner’s orchestral score; the music’s almost outrageous grandiloquence matches the passion and absolute seriousness of the film, and underscores Steiner’s reputation as the Tchaikovsky of the Hollywood golden age. The film was a sensational success and its keynote scene where Henreid suavely lights two cigarettes at once – one for him, one for Davis – was much copied by saucer-eyed fans. Clive James confessed that he attempted it while trying to impress a girl on a date, only for her to say she didn’t smoke, leaving him looking like a walrus.
Charlotte Vale (Davis) is a young woman from a wealthy Boston family who is bullied by her domineering widowed mother, played by Gladys Cooper. Under this tyranny, Charlotte has become a tearful, frumpy, bespectacled spinster with unplucked eyebrows, who lives at home and, in one of the film’s most showstopping lines bitterly reveals her secret addictions: “Cigarettes and medicated sherry and books my mother won’t allow me to read!” Her concerned sister realises that Charlotte is having a nervous breakdown and insists her mother let her stay at a sanatorium run by kindly, shrewd Dr Jaquith, an unassumingly excellent performance from Claude Rains.