Blu-ray Review: Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager on the Criterion Collection

Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager remains a highly narcotic, swoon-inducing romance in the Bette Davis canon. It’s an unabashed soap opera about how true love gets hindered by social conventions, and manages to squeeze in a moralistic tale of female self-empowerment to boot. Toss in a third-act bit of passive-aggressive wish fulfillment, where our high society heroine projects the love of a man she cannot have onto his unsuspecting, needy daughter, and there’s enough here to make one’s head spin. But that cloudy feeling isn’t a drawback; it’s more like floating with a film whose indulgences are reminiscent of foolishly falling in love. You ignore the flaws.

Boston heiress Charlotte Vale (Davis) is a walking disaster of sheltered neurosis, a slave to the domineering whims of her elderly mother (Gladys Cooper). Enter kindly psychiatrist Dr. Jasquith (a soft-spoken Claude Rains), who adores the messy art of pipe smoking and draws Charlotte in with his bedside manner and winning curiosity. As if following the lead of Pygmalion’s Henry Higgins, the doctor completely transforms Charlotte’s life: It seems that all that the poor, sweet young woman ever needed was a new hairdo, to dress in the latest fashions, and to take off those dowdy spectacles. And to test this new, improved Charlotte, Dr. Jasquith encourages her to take a pleasure cruise to Rio and take advantage of her rediscovered womanhood.

Now, Voyager’s extended prologue belongs to Rains as the ne plus ultra of the ideal therapist for any woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But rest assured, this is a Davis film, and she rightly takes her place as the repressed female coming into her own through a charming dalliance with suave, debonair Jerry (Paul Henreid). And the pleasure cruise grows all the more pleasurable as Charlotte takes courageous risks in meeting Jerry, struggling through conversations and gradually realizing she’s an interesting person, and that an interesting guy is into her. Henreid, best known for his stiff idealist in Casablanca, handles this role with easy, continental grace, and, of course, more than just girls will wish they were Bette when he casually lights two cigarettes at once and offers one to her. And by moonlight, I might add.

This is all ladled on with velvety, manipulative broad strokes, yet Now, Voyager somehow manages to transcend its particularly corny allegiance to the template of the woman’s picture. Much of that has to do with Davis, who always threw herself headlong into these parts, to women gripped by hysteria or the allure of a glamorous life. She gets to do both here, and because Charlotte is fighting against being a spinster and has picked the right Mr. Right, we actually give a damn beyond the camp antics that Davis is sometimes notorious for.

Naturally, these lovers are blocked because Jerry the brilliant architect is trapped in an unhappy marriage and struggling with a daughter, Tina (Janis Wilson), who’s as crazed and unhappy as the old Charlotte. They enjoy their ephemeral moments of happiness before parting, with Charlotte surviving the experience and becoming popular with a social set of celebrities and big shots. Though she continues to struggle to deal with her sinister mother, a few elaborate plot contrivances at least find her saving herself by saving the tormented Tina. Yes, a lot of ground gets covered across Now, Voyager’s two hours, and while it all feels like three or four different features have been crammed together, it’s never dull.

In true Old Hollywood fashion, the final scene ties it all together rather neatly and elegantly. Jerry and Charlotte draw together and move apart as if they were floating in orbit, so, of course, their final sequence together has them on her balcony—once again under the night sky. You will never forget Charlotte’s rapturous moment of awareness: “Don’t ask for the moon. We have the stars.” Now, Voyager is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, and if it can feel pretty foolish at times, it’s unforgettable for how sincere and affectionate it is toward one particularly time-honored cliché: that only fools falls in love.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s 4K restorations of classic, black-and-white Hollywood movies are, without a doubt, among the foremost pleasures of collecting physical media as the entire enterprise continues its long sunset. But in the case of Now, Voyager, the quantum leap forward in image quality from its last home-video release is appropriately as stunning as Charlotte’s transition from anxious frump to alluring sophisticate to earth mother. The luminous cinematography of Sol Polito (most famous, perhaps, for the still mind-bending Gold Diggers of 1933) comes off somehow both assertive and delicate, showcasing just how much the camera loved Bette Davis no matter how many times she claimed to be anything less than stunning. Flaws are almost nonexistent, limited solely to those inherent in the source material. The dynamic range of grays is rich, lending extra subtlety to the never-fully-melodramatic scenario. Speaking of dynamics, the Oscar-winning string section of Max Steiner’s score is given an uncompressed mono track that prevents it from crushing too harshly, or resembling too closely the hurricane of repressed rage residing in what used to be Mrs. Windle Vale’s chest cavity.

Extras

Now, Voyager comes to Criterion on the same day as they’re also releasing Davis’s uncontested masterpiece, All About Eve. But while their release of All About Eve ends up recycling nearly all of its bonus features from the many various editions that have come before it, Now, Voyager slate of extra content is almost entirely new. Well, not technically new in the sense that it includes a number of archival clips, but the assemblage is indeed fresh.

First and foremost is the entirety of Davis’s appearance on a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett’s knack for spending as little time as possible teeing up his interview subjects up to go off at length reaches some kind of record here, with Davis grabbing the reins of her time on set and darting from topic to topic with whiplash-inducing alacrity. Among her observations are that Yankees are better at imitating Southern accents than vice versa, that Hollywood in its golden era yielded the best female stars and Britain supplied most of the male ones, that oil companies buying up all the film studios was primarily responsible for the evaporation of “fun” on movie sets. And hundreds of other delicious asides.

Far less meaty but certainly welcome is a vintage 1980 news clip detailing the life and times of Paul Henreid, who at the time had just been awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. There isn’t a feature-length commentary track, and the selected-scene, 30-minute one that the disc does feature focuses exclusively on the musical leitmotifs Steiner develops throughout the film. That said, critic Ferran Smith Nehme proffers a half-hour overview of Davis’s career and Now, Voyager’s place therein that, when paired with film professor Patricia White’s booklet essay, more than make up the difference. Rounding things out are a look at Orry-Kelly’s costumes, which were tailor-made for an insistently braless Davis, along with two creaky Lux Radio Theater adaptations. Finally, the accompanying booklet includes a 1937 essay in which Davis spends about 8,000 words or so describing a day in the life of an actress.

Overall

Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have Criterion’s dazzling new restoration of Now, Voyager.