Now, Voyager

THe ultimate weepy (yes, I do but I'm not telling you which scene), and what could have been risible and melodramatic becomes, in the hands of a completely top-notch ensemble, a movie to cherish. Bette Davis dons a plain cotton house-dress, orthopedic shoes, spectacles and a 'do that screams "if I control one thing in my life, it will be my marcelled hair" to portray Charlotte Vale, the only daughter of a top-tier Boston family who has has been systematically beaten down by a cold and vicious tyrant of a mother (played to the blood-curdling hilt by Gladys Cooper - when a young friend of mine saw a few moments of her performance he thought she was Margaret Hamilton reprising her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, and it's a reasonable error to make). Charlotte attends therapy, goes on a cruise in a new frock (the transformation is eye-popping), falls in love with a married man (chastely, of course); returns home. After her mother's death, she suffers a relapse and returns to the sanitorium, only to meet the one person who could and will forever connect her to the man she loves and validate their relationship. Watch, weep, applaud. We have the stars.

if you've ever been the underdog or the ugly duckling watch this one and see what you can become because Betty Davis will show you how with some encouragement of Claude Rains it will tug at your heartstrings :-)it is a beautiful fantastic movie you can watch it hundreds of times and you will wanna watch it one more time again!

This is one of my favorite "classic" films; amazing to me that at that time the major studios were turning out so many films rapidly, and that so many were good! The film is a shameless tearjerker, but who can resist it? Haven't we all felt awkward at some point in our lives, and then we "find" ourselves? I've read the book, and the movie is an effective adaption, lifting a good portion of the dialogue intact. It's refreshing that the screenwriter didn't choose to entirely discard the work of Olive Higgins Prouty. The sets are gorgeous, the Oscar-winning score by Max Steiner is evocative and lush, and the costumes convey the characters beautifully. All the parts are cast perfectly -- there's a reason that both Bette Davis and Gladys Cooper received nominations. And to top it off, the Library of Congress selected this film for preservation in the US National Film Registry, and it ranks #23 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions.