Now, Voyager (DVD)

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It is regrettable but true that female movie stars have always had a pretty short shelf life in Hollywood. While male stars are still filling lead roles well into their fifties and sixties and romancing girls half their age, women are usually past their starring prime by their mid thirties and are thereafter relegated to small character parts, mothers, or grandmothers.

But there are the exceptions. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn are examples that come to mind. And since it's Bette Davis who is the subject here, take a look at a starring career that spanned six decades, starting in 1931 with "The Bad Sister" and ending in 1989 with "Wicked Stepmother." In between there were any number of classics: "Waterloo Bridge" (1931), "The Cabin in the Cotton" (1932), "Of Human Bondage" (1934), "The Petrified Forest" (1936), "Jezebel" (1938), "Dark Victory" (1939), "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939), "The Little Foxes" (1941), "Now, Voyager" (1942), "Deception" (1946), "All About Eve" (1950), "The Star" (1952), "The Virgin Queen" (1955), "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962), "Dead Ringer" (1964), "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), "Death on the Nile" (1978), "The Whales of August" (1987), and probably a dozen more of your own favorites that I missed.

Ms. Davis's career included romances and romantic adventures, gushy melodramas, so-called women's pictures, straight serious dramas, and gothic mysteries. She was, indeed, an actress of many talents and temperaments.

In honor of her position as one of Tinseltown's major leading ladies, Warner Bros. have put together "The Bette Davis Collection," a box set of five of her more-important pictures. It does not include what I consider to be her very best film, "All About Eve," because that title was issued separately on DVD a few years earlier, but it does contain "Dark Victory," "The Letter," "Mr. Skeffington," "The Star," and the subject of our present review, "Now, Voyager," each title also available separately.

"Now, Voyager" is an unabashed soap opera, a tearjerker that over the years has had more than a few viewers reaching for their hankies, and no one's ever wanted it any other way. It became one of Davis's most popular films. The movie, which recounts the experiences of an overprotected, ugly-duckling spinster who is encouraged by her therapist to change her life, takes its title from two poems by Walt Whitman from his collection "Leaves of Grass." The first poem, which is referred to in the movie, reads, "The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, Now, Voyager sail thou forth, to seek and find." The second poem reads, "Now finale to the shore! Now, land and life, finale, and farewell! Now Voyager depart! (much, much for thee is yet in store)." In either case, the lines are apt. The lady charts a new course for herself, a physical makeover followed by a literal sea voyage that turns her into a new person.

Charlotte Vale (Davis, Oscar nominated for the role)--plump, graying, bushy eye-browed, never married--has lived her entire life under the thumb her repressive, mean-spirited mother, a mother we're told never wanted Charlotte in the first place. The Vales are a rich, old Boston family, and the mother, Mrs. Henry Windle Vale (Gladys Cooper, also Oscar nominated for her role), expects only the most proper decorum and devotion from her daughter. Poor Charlotte tends to her mother's every whim until she has a nervous breakdown, whereupon at the urging of her sister she visits the country retreat of Dr. Jarquith (Claude Rains), a renowned psychiatrist, for a few months' therapy.

At the suggestion of Dr. Jarquith, Charlotte effects a complete physical makeover, losing weight, dying her hair, dressing more smartly, and, most important, plucking her eyebrows! Then, heeding Whitman's advice, she voyages forth on a cruise to Rio, where on board she meets the man of her dreams. Jerry Durrance, played by Paul Henreid, is perfect in almost every way--a handsome, charming, debonair architect. He is an elegant gentleman traveling alone on business to South America, but as Charlotte is soon to find out, he is also very, very married, with a wife and two daughters. (Henreid was on a roll at the time, having made this film and "Casablanca" back to back.) Their shipboard friendship soon blossoms into a full-fledged love affair and leads to the movie's subsequent complications. It was not an age such as our own where divorce was a common answer to marital difficulties. Jerry will not, or cannot, divorce his wife.