BEFORE: Bette Davis carries over from "Dark Victory". It's weird for me because Bette Davis was old when I was young, so I've never really seen her as a young woman before. It's a bit like seeing Angela Lansbury in "Gaslight", which was her first movie appearance, you can easily forget that someone who's been old for so long was once not so old.
AFTER: Just as there was a lot that science didn't know about cancer when they made "Dark Victory", I'm guessing that therapy, and feminism, have also come a long way since the days of "Now, Voyager". Today it's a lot more accepted if a woman hasn't been married by the age of 30 - especially if she's been concentrating on her career. But back in the 1940's, if a woman didn't have a ring by her mid-30's, she was labelled a "spinster", and she just might as well start wearing shawls and granny glasses and purchase a cemetery plot for one.
Shy girls are shy girls, no matter the decade, but we wouldn't send a woman to an institution these days just because she wasn't having much luck in the romance department. "Single" does not equal "crazy" the way it used to. When you factor in the divorce rate, sometimes I wonder if the eternally single don't have the right idea in the long run anyway.
Here Davis plays a sort of "late bloomer", or rather she bloomed when in her early 20's, and her overbearing mother nipped that in the bud. She fell in love with a crewman on a cruise ship, and then doesn't get another chance at love until years later, when she takes another cruise. Cruises are social places, but they represent an altered reality. To me it's not surprising that she falls in love on a cruise, and then can't keep the same relationship going afterward - when you leave the ship, it's like going back to the real world.
She gets engaged to another man, but that's sort of scuttled when she sees her love from the cruise again - and what he represents, I suppose. But other events send her back to the sanitarium, where she just happens to befriend her cruise lover's daughter, seeing her as a kindred spirit. The way to a man's heart is through his neglected, socially awkward daughter, I suppose. What's surprising is that the psychiatrist who runs the institution allows this friendship to develop, even though he knows that she was once involved with the girl's father. As I said, I think therapy has come a long way since - this is another thing that probably wouldn't fly today.
Also starring Paul Henreid (last seen in "Casablanca"), Claude Rains (last seen in "Notorious"), Gladys Cooper, Bonita Granville, Mary Wickes (last seen in "Postcards From the Edge").
RATING: 5 out of 10 ivory boxes
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