Steve Hayes has picked another of my favorite movies this week. Now Voyager is Betty Davis at her best. We love to think of her as the bitch but I really like her when she is vulnerable and unsure of herself. Gladys cooper as her mother is amazing but I really love Mary Wicks as the nurse. Good old Mary ws always cast as a nurse, a housekeeper, or a nun.
Now, Voyager (1942) is the quintessential, soap-opera or "woman's picture" ('weepie') and one of Bette Davis' best-acted and remembered films in the 40s, coming shortly after other early Davis classics including Jezebel (1938), Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid (1939), All This and Heaven Too (1940), and The Letter (1940). Her unglamorous portrayal of Charlotte Vale - a mousy, dowdy and overweight, frustrated, mother-hating virginal spinster early in the film is a remarkable acting achievement. The producer Hal B. Wallis had originally intended on having the lead role played by Irene Dunne, and then Norma Shearer or Ginger Rogers.
The title of the romantic melodrama film was taken from well-known American poet Walt Whitman's 1892 Leaves of Grass (from the section titled The Untold Want):
The Untold Want By Life and Land Ne'er Granted Now, Voyager Sail Thou Forth to Seek and Find
In the film, the psychiatrist (Claude Rains) who aids the repressed woman's recovery and transformation (into a modern, attractive, and glamorous woman) as she fights to free herself from tyrannical shackles of her domineering mother, presents her with the quoted words when she is on the verge of breaking out with an ocean cruise/voyage.
Directed by Irving Rapper, its screenplay by Casey Robinson was based on the 1941 novel by Olive Higgins Prouty (who also wrote Stella Dallas). Max Steiner provides the lush, romanticized, Academy Award-winning score for the film that was nominated for a total of three Academy Awards, including Best Actress (Bette Davis) and Best Supporting Actress (Gladys Cooper), with Steiner's nomination as the sole win (his second Oscar).
The plot of the film is about the strident efforts of a neurotic child to be liberated from repressive, matriarchal domination. Treatment is successful, owing to care by a psychiatrist (therapy was coming into vogue in the early 40s) and a love affair with a charming, Euro-American married man who already has a wife and children. The film concludes with Charlotte's lavishing of attention on his young, emotionally-unstable teenage daughter Tina (caused by another domineering mother) (an uncredited Janis Wilson) - her motherly love serves as a remote substitute for the couple's own romantically-complicated love. And the film's last stirring line of romantic dialogue has become immortal: "Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars."
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