Film review

  • Now, Voyager

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Irving Rapper (1942)

    Now, Voyager has long had the reputation of a kitsch classic, thanks to the leading man’s lighting-two-cigarettes-at-once trick, the leading lady’s closing line and more.  As if Max Steiner’s (Oscar-winning) score weren’t enough, it’s elbowed off the soundtrack, as the heartbreak quotient rises, by an over-generous helping of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique.  You watch the film well aware of the plot contrivances and the masochistic exaggeration; yet you’re convinced emotionally – by strong performances, well directed by Irving Rapper, and some good dialogue by Casey Stephenson.  His screenplay is adapted from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote the source material for Stella Dallas.

    Dowdy spinster Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) is tyrannised by her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper), the matriarch of a wealthy Boston family to which Charlotte, who has three elder brothers, was a belated and unwanted addition.  Her kindly sister-in-law, Lisa (Ilka Chase), concerned about Charlotte’s mental health, arranges for an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains), to visit the Vale mansion to assess her.  Stuff and nonsense, according to Mrs Vale, but Jaquith stands his ground and confirms that Charlotte has had a nervous breakdown.  She spends time in Jaquith’s sanatorium.  After making a good recovery and transforming her appearance, she embarks on a cruise.  On the ship, she meets the splendidly named Jeremiah Duvaux Durrance (Paul Henreid), aka Jerry, travelling alone but a married man.  Charlotte and Jerry, an architect, fall in love but are too principled to take it further.  Friends of Jerry know that his wife (who’s never seen) is a pious fraud but he feels an inviolable responsibility towards the couple’s two daughters, especially Tina, the younger.  The resonances with Charlotte’s own circumstances are unmistakable:  jealously manipulative Mrs Durrance, who rules the roost, never wanted Tina.

    Spinsters may now be a dying breed but parental domination of, and duty to, children are hardly extinct.  Yet the themes of Now, Voyager play to contemporary experience to an extent twenty-first-century viewers may not easily appreciate.  Imagine all the unmarried women watching the film in the early 1940s whose main role in life was to care for a parent.  (Imagine how many struggled to find a parent-sitter to enable them to see Now, Voyager.)  Those parents didn’t have to be the monster that Mrs Vale is; they might indeed have been deeply loved and loving; but they governed their daughter’s world and constrained her freedom.  Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel was first published in 1941; by the time the film went into production early the next year, America had entered World War II.  So the separation of Charlotte and Jerry also spoke to married women.

    At first, it’s hard to say how old Charlotte is meant to be:  Bette Davis’s frump appurtenances aren’t exactly subtle – the thick spectacles, the even thicker eyebrows.  These may have helped the star ‘find’ Charlotte but it’s striking from the start how convincingly Davis, not the obvious choice to play a downtrodden character, inhabits the role.  Even in the early scenes, Charlotte doesn’t come across simply as a repressed spinster; she’s more a thwarted figure whose violent emotionality is never far from the surface.  Davis’ intuitive understanding of how quickly to move – and of the dramatic contribution speed of movement makes – is strongly in evidence here.  Her initial disguise obviously adds to the impact of Charlotte’s new look when she joins the cruise but it’s a strength of Now, Voyager (the lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘The Untold Want’ which give the film its title are quoted in the script) that it eschews facile metamorphosis.  Charlotte retains a lack of self-confidence and cynicism for some time after becoming glamorously sophisticated.  Her mother is far from instantly vanquished.

    Mrs Vale’s eventual defeat is a real coup de théâtre, though.  Having accused her daughter of malingering, she herself becomes, once Charlotte starts gradually to assert her independence, a bedridden hypochondriac. – until the pair’s conclusive showdown.  Losing patience, Charlotte quotes Dr Jaquith’s belief that ‘Tyranny can be an expression of the maternal instinct’ and declares that:  ‘I didn’t want to be born.  You didn’t want me to be born.  It’s been a calamity on both sides’.  The words inflict an instant, fatal heart attack on Mrs Vale.  She expires on the spot.  Preposterous as it sounds, this makes sense in context:  the sustained melodramatic intensity of the film has paved the way for it.

    Charlotte takes the place of an eleventh-hour defector from the cruise called Camille Beauchamp – and uses this pseudonym when she first meets Jerry.  He soon finds out her real name but Charlotte remains to him the lady of the camellias:  after they’ve parted company and Charlotte returns to Boston, Jerry regularly, anonymously sends the flowers to her.  In fact, Charlotte’s fate is the polar opposite of Alexandre Dumas’s Marguerite, who has her love affair with Armand but dies.  Charlotte survives; her relationship with Jerry is doomed to remain unconsummated for as long as his wife is alive.  The latter, in the closing stages of Now, Voyager, is reported to be gravely ill but this scarcely matters:  by now, the principals’ continuing self-denial has come to seem invincible.

    Guilt-stricken at having killed her mother in a few sentences, Charlotte returns to the sanatorium.  The inmates now include twelve-year-old Tina Durrance (Janis Wilson), whose misery and isolation, reminding the heroine of her own past suffering, do more than take Charlotte’s mind off her problems.  She becomes preoccupied with Tina’s welfare.  With Dr Jaquith’s permission, she takes the girl under her wing and, in time, into her home (the house that Charlotte has now inherited from her mother).  Here, too, the plotting is almost comically improbable yet emotionally coherent.  Caring for Tina realises Charlotte’s own motherly potential and provides a means to seeing Jerry regularly, and platonically.  Hence the closing exchange, when he asks if she’ll be happy with this life and Charlotte replies, ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon … we have the stars’.  Sol Polito’s camera heads for the glittering night sky.

    As Jerry, quietly charming Paul Henreid isn’t overshadowed the way he would be in Casablanca, which opened in cinemas a few weeks after Now, Voyager.  There’s something slightly eccentric in Henreid’s face and manner.  As well as an effective romantic partner to Bette Davis, he contrasts satisfyingly with the impeccably colourless John Loder as Elliot Livingstone – a lawyer, a member of one of Boston’s ‘best’ families and, for the short time he’s engaged to be married to Charlotte, the one thing about her daughter of which Mrs Vale approves.  Gladys Cooper plays the despot mother with more aplomb than variety; although that’s hardly Cooper’s fault, it’s noticeable that the brilliant Claude Rains brings plenty of nuance to his similarly narrow character.   He’s finally rewarded when Dr Jaquith agrees to Charlotte’s caring for Tina – and the script seems to recognise how benignly omniscient and omnipotent it’s made Jaquith throughout.  He warns her that ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away’.

    Charlotte:  How does it feel to be the Lord?

    Jaquith:  Not so very wonderful since the free will bill was passed.  Too little power.

    Janis Wilson is impressively truthful as Tina – her upset feels real.  It’s a pity that Wilson’s screen career seems to have ended before the 1940s were out (she’s good again in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)).  Others doing well, in smaller parts, include Lee Patrick, as a fellow passenger on the cruise who knows Jerry and puts Charlotte in the picture about his wife, and Ilka Chase.  As the latter’s daughter, Bonita Granville is fairly gruesome but probably meant to be.  It’s difficult now to stomach Frank Puglia’s turn as an inept and craven Latino car driver but at least he’s not around for long.  It’s a pity that Franklin Pangborn, as the  harassed but bossy cruise supervisor, isn’t around for longer.

    14 August 2021

  • Old Acquaintance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincent Sherman (1943)

    The play Old Acquaintance was first staged in 1940; its author, John Van Druten, adapted it for the screen three years later, in collaboration with Lenore Coffee and Edmund Goulding.  Decades on, Hollywood film-makers were still drawing on Van Druten’s essential scenario – without acknowledgement in Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point in 1977, more explicitly in Rich and Famous, George Cukor’s last film, in 1981.  You might naturally expect the Golden Age progenitor to be well defined in ways that its successors – products of a less self-confident era of American movie-making – struggled to be.  Not so, at least as far as Old Acquaintance versus The Turning Point is concerned (I haven’t seen Rich and Famous).  The Ross film is no great shakes but at least Arthur Laurents’ spell-everything-out screenplay has the merit of clarity – unlike the script for Vincent Sherman’s picture.

    The action opens in 1924, when Katherine ‘Kit’ Marlowe (Bette Davis), a young New York-based writer, returns in triumph to her home town – the latest stop on a lecture tour, following the publication of her book ‘Bury My Soul’, which has caused quite a stir.  Kit will be staying with Millie (Miriam Hopkins), her best friend from girlhood, who’s now married to Preston Drake (John Loder) and expecting her first baby.  Millie will soon give birth to something else, too.  Although initially excited by the prospect of Kit’s arrival, she’s instantly irked by the adulation her friend receives, and has already taken retaliatory action by writing her own novel.  We never find out much about Kit’s work, except that it’s ‘serious’ stuff that takes time to write and doesn’t sell.  In contrast, Millie churns out romantic fiction at speed and with great commercial success.

    Eight years and as many published novels later, Millie’s husband and even her daughter Deirdre (Francine Rufo) take second place to her career.  The family visits New York for the opening of a play by Kit but the focus is on the accelerating demise of the Drakes’ marriage, and Kit’s increasing closeness to Preston and little DeDe (as her father and Kit call her:  Millie insists on Deirdre).  Preston walks out on Millie and wants to start a new life with Kit but she selflessly says no, out of loyalty to her old friend.  Ten years later, the US has just entered World War II and Kit takes part in a radio broadcast to promote the American Red Cross.  Preston, now an army major, hears the broadcast and gets in touch with her.  By now, Kit has a much younger boyfriend, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young).  On the point of joining up, he wants to marry Kit before he goes off to fight.  She asks for a few days to think the proposal over – time enough for Rudd, miffed by her hesitation, to transfer his affections to the now eighteen-year-old Deirdre (Dolores Moran).

    When she discovers Kit has not only met up with Preston but also invited Deirdre along to the reunion, egomaniacally delusional Millie sees an opportunity for rapprochement with her ex-husband.  She’s horrified that he agrees to see her only in order to request joint custody of their daughter and tell her he has a new fiancée.  Preston also takes the opportunity to inform Millie he was once in love with Kit.  This sends Millie into paroxysms of recrimination:  she tells Deirdre that Kit is a Jezebel; when Kit announces she’s going to marry Rudd, Millie also brands her a cradle-snatcher.  Once she finds out what’s happened between Rudd and Deirdre, Kit also goes into overdrive, though of an altruistic kind, rescuing Deirdre from a rake called Lucian Grant (Phillip Reed).  I can’t remember why, now that she’s Rudd’s preferred choice, Deirdre is in Grant’s clutches.  The men in the story are a dreary bunch (even Gig Young) and it’s obvious when Deirdre’s a little girl that she’ll always be a spoilt brat.  I got increasingly impatient with scenes involving her and the male characters – I couldn’t see why we were expected to be interested in what happened to them.

    A very few minutes into the film, you’re wondering how Kit’s friendship with inane, intensely selfish Millie survived even nursery school – and, for that matter, what attracted dull but civilised Preston to the woman he married.  You spend the rest of Old Acquaintance waiting for an explanation that never arrives – beyond Kit’s response to Preston, when he asks why she puts up with his wife, that Millie’s parents were kind to orphaned Kit when she was growing up.  (The heft of this emotional debt is never again mentioned.)  Once the action has moved to New York for acts two and three, it’s no easier to understand why Kit and Millie, who appear to have nothing in common, live in each other’s pockets.  Deirdre might seem to be the child that Kit has never had but her maternal feelings for the girl are less an expression of parasitic mothering than of a generous sense of responsibility – in the face of Millie’s self-absorption and consequent negligence of her daughter.

    In her mid-thirties when the film was made, Bette Davis is completely convincing as the twenty-something Kit.  Her wit and vibrancy are elating in these early scenes and Davis is entertaining throughout – Old Acquaintance would be a miserable affair without her – but her character makes less and less sense.   Kit – to Millie’s chagrin – becomes a leading light of New York literary society, and a publicly respected figure, but there’s little evidence of either; most of the time, she might as well be Millie’s self-sacrificing, unmarried sister.  Preston and Rudd are the only men in Kit’s life (though it’s hard to see how the latter arrived in it).  I couldn’t buy the received wisdom that Davis’ and Miriam Hopkins’ off-screen enmity gives an edge to the set-tos between Kit and Millie:  Hopkins’ hammy monotony persistently gets in the way.

    Kit’s eventual loss of patience is worth waiting for.  She’s about to take her leave, after an exchange of home truths with Millie, when the latter comes out with a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back remark.  Kit puts down her shopping, walks back across the room; in exasperation, she takes hold of Millie’s shoulders and shakes her vigorously.  Kit then calmly says ‘Sorry’, picks up her shopping and exits.  Davis plays this wonderfully but the moment is powerful largely because what Kit does to Millie is what the viewer wants to do to Miriam Hopkins.  The leading ladies’ last-scene reconciliation – for the sake of and to the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – feels quite mechanical.   It’s not just that Millie is in no way a reformed character.  There’s never been plausible substance to the women’s enduring friendship – supposedly the heart of the story.

    11 August 2021

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