Now, Voyager (Warner Bros., 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, July 1) Turner Classic Movies ran a double bill of Paul Henried’s two most famous films: Now, Voyager and Casablanca. I’ve already written extensively about Casablanca and posted to moviemagg about it twice, in 2012 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/casablanca-warner-bros-1942.html) and 2017 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/05/casablanca-warner-bros-1942.html). So I’ll concentrate my current comments on Now, Voyager. Now, Voyager was based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, whose most famous book was Stella Dallas, and as you might suspect from that ancestry it’s a double-barreled assault on the tear ducts. It was turned into a movie by screenwriter Casey Robinson (who was also involved in Casablanca: he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman but, because at that time he was taking credit only for scripts he’d written entirely by himself, he declined credit for Casablanca and thereby did himself out of an Academy Award) and director Irving Rapper, who was deservedly proud of it. Rapper cast the film himself, though the original plan was to have Irene Dunne star as Charlotte Vale, the old-maid aunt of a well-to-do Boston family who’s an ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful swan through a stint at the Cascades sanitarium in Vermont and the therapy of super-psychologist Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). Bette Davis was incensed that anyone other than her was considered for the role, especially since the character was from Boston, as she was herself, and she didn’t see why Jack Warner should pay the higher fee for a free-lancer when he already had Davis under contract. Eventually Davis got the part and turned in an indelible performance as both sides of the Charlotte Vale character. The title comes from Walt Whitman’s poem Songs of Parting: “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,/ Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

Director Irving Rapper told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse that he cast the film himself: “I was starting to sail high, and they gave me my head.” The biggest bit of casting was Ilka Chase as Lisa Vale, Charlotte’s domineering mother from hell. It seems that Charlotte was the last of her children and was born quite a few years later than her three previous ones, all sons. As a result, Lisa never let Charlotte forget that her very existence was an inconvenience for her, and Lisa intended to get back at Charlotte by totally dominating her life and holding the threat of disinheritance over Charlotte if she ever got out of line. There’s a crucial flashback sequence in which she was taking a cruise and was romanced by one of the ship’s officers, radio operator Leslie Trotter (Charles Drake, later Judy Garland’s “boy next door” in Meet Me in St. Louis and the male romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ spoof A Night in Casablanca), only both Lisa Vale and the ship’s captain went out of their way to break them up. The film opens with Lisa Vale summoning Dr. Jaquith to the Vale family mansion to discuss treating Charlotte, who’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Charlotte spends most of her time in her room carving elaborate jewelry boxes made of ivory, and Jaquith sees one and is impressed by her craftspersonship. Eventually Charlotte spends three months at Cascades (inspired, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, by the real-life Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which focused on physical, occupational, and talk therapy and totally avoided lobotomies and the other major surgical interventions that were standard treatments for mental illness elsewhere), and when we see her again she’s doffed the shapeless dresses she wore at home. Instead she’s on the gangway of a ship dressed in a stylish gown and wearing a large sun hat, though she’s still prone to gestures that illustrate her former shyness. (In fact one of the best aspects of Bette Davis’s acting in this film is the brief bits in which she reverts to the behaviors of the old Charlotte Vale even after she becomes the new one.) The cruise she’s taking is to South America, and on board she meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henried), an unhappily married former architect turned financier.

Jerry admits early on in his relationship with Charlotte that he’s married and has three kids, two sons and a daughter born, like Charlotte herself, much later than the other two. We never actually see Mrs. Durrance, though Robinson’s script drops a hint that she’s become an invalid and that raises the possibility that they might have considered having her die of natural causes so Jerry and Charlotte could get together. Much to the credit of both Olive Higgins Prouty and Casey Robinson, that doesn’t happen; instead Jerry and Charlotte drift into an uncertain affair that pushed the boundaries of the Production Code big-time, especially when they’re stranded in the Brazilian countryside after their driver, Giuseppe (an odd comic-relief performance by Frank Puglia, who usually played thugs), crashes their car off a cliff. One of the most famous scenes in the film had its origins in a part of the book in which a man lights a match, passes the burning match to his female partner, then she lights her cigarette with the match, passes it back to him, and he lights his own cigarette. When Paul Henried and Bette Davis tried this on screen, the match kept burning out before they could complete the scene and often burned their fingers. So an exasperated Henried told Rapper, “Why don’t I just put two cigarettes in my mouth, light both of them, and hand one to Bette?” That became one of the favorite scenes in the film and a lot of real-life couples copied it, though over the years Rapper pointed to at least two previous films that had shown that bit of business, a D. W. Griffith silent from 1917 and The Rich Are Always With Us, a 1932 film starring Ruth Chatterton, George Brent, and (in a minor role) Bette Davis herself. After her ship comes home and she returns to her mom’s house after her uncertain relationship with Jerry, Charlotte falls into a sort-of affair with another young Bostonian from a well-to-do family, Elliot Livingston (British actor John Loder, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage and later one of Hedy Lamarr’s husbands). Her mom is thrilled at the idea that the Livingston and Vale fortunes will be united by this marriage, but Charlotte bails on it because she’s not in love with him ¬– as is effectively dramatized by a scene at a Boston Symphony concert where she sits between Elliot and Jerry as the orchestra plays the big sentimental second subject of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony.

Ultimately she returns to The Cascades for a refresher course, where she meets Tina (Janis Wilson), Jerry’s 12-year-old daughter. Noting the similarities between Tina’s background and her own, Charlotte reaches out to her and starts insisting to Jaquith and his staff that she can be more help to Tina than they can. Charlotte asks to be allowed to take Tina back to Boston with her, and Jaquith agrees as long as she promises not to use that as an excuse to resume her affair with Tina’s dad. Charlotte and Tina even end up in bed together, which in 1942 was undoubtedly read much more innocently than it would be in a modern film. Ultimately Lisa Vale dies without having carried through on her threats to disinherit Charlotte, and Charlotte ends up with the bulk of the Vale family fortune. The ending reminded Charles of the 1949 film The Heiress, based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square (1880), also about a rather mousy young woman who’s raised by a domineering single parent (a father instead of a mother this time) and who has to shut down her romantic side after falling for a wastrel who just wanted her for her money. (When Charles and I watched The Heiress together Charles resented the ending, in which the heiress, played by Bette Davis’s lifelong friend Olivia de Havilland, leaves her boyfriend, played by Montgomery Clift, futilely knocking on her door in the rain. Charles said that by locking him out she was condemning herself to a sexless life, and I pointed out that in 1880 if a woman married, her property automatically became her husband’s. The legal protections that now exist for a well-to-do woman marrying a not-so-well-to-do man that give her ways to shield her fortune from him weren’t available then.) Now, Voyager didn’t seem like The Heiress to me, mainly because in Now, Voyager the man who romances the heiress is genuinely in love with her and they can’t get together because he has a wife already, not because he’s a gold-digger after her fortune. Indeed, Charlotte helps Jerry materially by lobbying Dr. Jaquith to give him the job of designing a new wing for The Cascades, thereby enabling him to resume the career he really wanted all along. Director Rapper said of Now, Voyager, “The story wasn’t that good, more or less Cosmopolitan magazine level, but what made that picture great was brilliant acting.” He also said it was the first film he made that contained a scene with rain, which later became a trademark for him.