Rating: NR
Genre:
Romance
Release Date: 06/14/2005
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol/Por
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD1
Run Time: 118 Minutes
Flags: Adult Situations
Distributor/Studio: Warner Home Video
Olive Higgins Prouty's popular novel was transformed into nearly two hours of high-grade
soap opera by several masters of the trade:
Warner Bros.,
Bette Davis,
Paul Henreid, director
Irving Rapper, and screenwriter
Casey Robinson.
Davis plays repressed
Charlotte Vale, dying on the vine thanks to her domineering mother (
Gladys Cooper). All-knowing psychiatrist
Dr. Jaquith (
Claude Rains) urges
Charlotte to make several radical changes in her life, quoting
Walt Whitman: "Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find." Slowly,
Charlotte emerges from her cocoon of tight hairdos and severe clothing to blossom into a gorgeous fashion plate. While on a long ocean voyage, she falls in love with
Jerry Durrance (
Henreid), who is trapped in a loveless marriage. After kicking over the last of her traces at home,
Charlotte selflessly becomes a surrogate mother to
Jerry's emotionally disturbed daughter (a curiously uncredited
Janis Wilson), who is on the verge of becoming the hysterical wallflower that
Charlotte once was. An interim romance with another man (
John Loder) fails to drive
Jerry from
Charlotte's mind. The film ends ambiguously;
Jerry is still married, without much chance of being divorced from his troublesome wife, but the newly self-confident
Charlotte is willing to wait forever if need be. "Don't ask for the moon," murmurs
Charlotte as
Max Steiner's romantic music reaches a crescendo, "we have the stars." In addition to this famous line,
Now, Voyager also features the legendary "two cigarettes" bit, in which
Jerry places two symbolic cigarettes between his lips, lights them both, and hands one to
Charlotte. The routine would be endlessly lampooned in subsequent films, once by
Henreid himself in the satirical
sword-and-sandal epic Siren of Baghdad (1953).
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
