Kim Carnes was right: Irving Frapper's Now, Voyager

 Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains. Dir. Irving Rapper, Warner Bros., 1942

I knew one thing about Now, Voyager before today, the infamous scene in which Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes at one before passing one to Bette Davis, a moment paid homage and parodied hundreds of times since 1942. I did not know the scene plays out three times, and that in two of them Davis and Henreid share a look so carnal it's as if their eyes make love. That's why the scene's so famous. Lighting both cigarettes is smooth, turning the first puff into a sex scene the Hays Code censors couldn't touch is moviemaking genius.

I also didn't know that Now, Voyager is sort of a road movie, progressing along the route Davis's Charlotte Vale's, unmarried spinster of an ancient Boston family, life following her treatment for a nervous breakdown brought on by her cruel, domineering mother, passing through the stages of her transition to full, functional adulthood. These include a love affair with Paul Henried's Jerry, a married businessman whose shrewish wife forces him to give up on architecture, his passion, and envies his closeness with his daughter, Tina, the inevitable confrontation with her mother, in which she refuses to return to the harried, beaten life she once lived, and discovering a passion for psychiatric nursing when she begins spending time with an awkward tween girl at the same sanatorium where she convalesced. The girl, of course, turns out to be Jerry's daughter, institutionalized to keep peace in the family home, which will ultimately reunite Charlotte and Jerry as not lovers but nurse/caregiver and concerned, married parent.

Therein lies the rub. Davis's physical and psychological transformation from a shapeless, hopeless victim to a stylish, confident woman via her stay in the hospital and a long international cruise afterward by turns elicited sympathy, respect, admiration, and joy from me. She faces down her mother, negotiates the currents of a middle-aged love affair with an eminently marriageable widower, and stumbles by accident into peer-to-peer counseling with Tina. Coming from a one-time involvement with the 12 Step groups, I found the scenes in which Charlotte and Tina bond over shared experience touched me. Janis Wilson plays Tina as a lost girl getting found, a convincing performance on both sides of the emotional divide. And yet.

For all of Charlotte's progress and growth, for all her strength and maturity, in the end she chooses a life without romance in favor of the greater joys of helping raise Tina, a choice which looks like the choice made for her at the film's start by her mother, when she ends an adolescent shipboard fling by forcing Charlotte to be her nurse and caretaker. Though the screenplay and Charlotte try to emphasize her sacrifice is for a greater good, with Charlotte telling Jerry, "Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars," it felt to me as if she trades her fulfilled life first for an old woman, then for a young child, suggesting - what, that even a sleek and sophisticated woman's highest calling lies in mothering, not wifing?

That's a rather grim and hopeless conclusion to a hopeful and inspiring trudge along what the 12 Steppers call "the road of the spirit." It made me question the point of all her hard work, and that's a weird ending for a girl-positive movie like Now, Voyager.

A pretty-good mashup of comeback story, romance, and domestic drama, Now, Voyager works thanks to Davis's powerhouse performance, matched by her supposedly-favorite costar Claude Rains as a gruff, kindly psychiatrist, and a smattering of great character roles, like Gladys Cooper's implacable mother or Mary Wickes, one of the head nuns in the Sister Act movies, as a wisecracking nurse.

Hollywood frequently fails to keep melodrama out of romances, and with an added mental illness subplot the opportunities for melodrama expand geometrically. Now, Voyager largely, if not entirely, keeps the amped emotion under control, but Davis oversells it a few times. It's not hard, though, to understand Davis's star power. Not conventionally attractive by some standards, Davis used her eyes, her voice, and her manner to be sexy regardless of her "beauty." When I think of actors with great presence, Davis is one. She owns the film, even in her rare moments off camera. I can't imagine Now, Voyager with another female lead. I cannot imagine Now, Voyager being good without Davis. Or even particularly memorable. Thanks to a couple of cigarettes and two of the best-known eyes in the world, however, it's a film I'm writing about 79 years after its release.

Kim Carnes wasn't kidding.