“Now, Voyager” (title from W. Whitman) is a mixture of Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote “Stella Dallas,” infantile fixation and Bette Davis, with the last two carrying the most weight and making the movie good. The appealing quality of this movie is the accuracy and extent to which it shows the relationship between a daughter (Bette Davis) and her mother (Gladys Cooper), and later, there being quite a few movies here, another mother-daughter relationship. It’s about the repressed daughter of Back Bay wealth, who is cured by a psychiatrist (Claude Rains), falls in love with a married man (Paul Henreid), whose wife and children keep Bette and him separated, apparently forever. Bette is compensated by the happiness of taking care of her lover’s neglected daughter.
In between the two solidly conceived mother-daughter relationships, which carry the tension that comes when the movies get down to life and behind the Hays office, there are some moth balls straight from Mrs. Prouty. This accounts for the feeling that you’ve seen this movie before—the tragic lady movie, in which girls like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Helen Hayes and Irene Dunne can’t marry the man they love but achieve a loftier happiness. Other moth balls are the ineffectual, doomed man married to an impossible woman, the tabu on divorce, some high-school psychotherapy, and that trip on a pleasure steamer to a foreign paradise where the ill starred lovers meet to the tinkle of contract bridge. Consistency is sacrificed for the sake of hokum drama: you might well ask why, if a psychiatrist got Bette safely out from under her mother, one was not used to get her lover untied. It leads to such things as the noble renunciation at the end. As Paul Henreid, who has kept his love on a high plane for eight long reels, makes one last grab at Bette, she holds him off yet saying, “Let’s not ask for the moon, we have the stars!” and out and up goes the camera to a starlit sky—no moon. What it seems is always lacking in the movies is a person with some sense and a pair of scissors.
But cutting in and out of this silliness is the frank intelligence about dominating mothers. The interacting relationship of mother, daughter and psychiatry (which should have been the whole movie instead of a springboard for a frustrated love affair) is exceptionally accurate. The scenes in which average people are faced with a neurotic illustrate reactions and conversational responses which are emotionally exact. One scene is perfect: a flashback to a repressed adolescent’s idea of love. There is a vitality in the playing, emanating mostly from Miss Davis, who is more vivid than hysterically mannered here. Gladys Cooper as the mother is genuinely upsetting as well as genuinely Back Bay, and Claude Rains, who is accustomed to rolling around in his characterizations as though they were bathtubs, rolls around some more but always with a knowledge of the part. (This is not a vote for the kind of typing that makes every neurotic Bette Davis, every psychiatrist Claude Rains, every younger sister Bonita Granville and every Ilka Chase type an Ilka Chase type.) The movie has fineness in spite of the distortion toward gentility given by its love affair.
“For Me and My Gal” is the backstage life of a vaudeville team, Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, and how it was never good enough to play the Palace. It includes things like tap dancing before the last war. I think Judy Garland is too young to be playing in pictures.
November 2, 1942