#Artmatic voyager review full

It isn’t vulgar or facetious to notice that, quite alone among the drama’s adult characters, Charlotte is the one fated never to have sexual experience. So Charlotte strives for redemption, or quasi-marriage, by becoming a kind of mother to Jerry’s unhappy youngest daughter, who is herself on the verge of a breakdown, and sees so much of herself in her.

#Artmatic voyager review full

On a cruise, she meets the handsome, attentive (and unhappily married) architect Jerry Durrance, played by Henreid, and falls in love with him, though knowing full well that his honour and decency will not permit an affair. Under his tutelage, Charlotte gets better and blossoms into an amazingly elegant and beautiful woman: one of the most glorious transformation scenes in Hollywood history. Under this tyranny, Charlotte has become a tearful, frumpy, bespectacled spinster with unplucked eyebrows, who lives at home and, in one of the film’s most showstopping lines bitterly reveals her secret addictions: “Cigarettes and medicated sherry and books my mother won’t allow me to read!” Her concerned sister realises that Charlotte is having a nervous breakdown and insists her mother let her stay at a sanatorium run by kindly, shrewd Dr Jaquith, an unassumingly excellent performance from Claude Rains. Clive James confessed that he attempted it while trying to impress a girl on a date, only for her to say she didn’t smoke, leaving him looking like a walrus.Ĭharlotte Vale (Davis) is a young woman from a wealthy Boston family who is bullied by her domineering widowed mother, played by Gladys Cooper.

The film was a sensational success and its keynote scene where Henreid suavely lights two cigarettes at once – one for him, one for Davis – was much copied by saucer-eyed fans. T he towering 1942 romantic melodrama Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid has been re-released, and its audiences will once again get swept away in the emotional tsunami created by Max Steiner’s orchestral score the music’s almost outrageous grandiloquence matches the passion and absolute seriousness of the film, and underscores Steiner’s reputation as the Tchaikovsky of the Hollywood golden age.