FILM 2028: NOW, VOYAGER

TRIVIA: The biggest box office hit of Bette Davis's career.

Paul Henreid's act of lighting two cigarettes at once caught the public's imagination and he couldn't go anywhere without being accosted by women begging him to light cigarettes for them.

The movie's line "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." was voted as the #46 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100).

The love theme from this film was later used as background music in the seduction scene from Mildred Pierce (1945).

Bette Davis complained about Max Steiner's Academy Award-winning musical score, saying that it was too intrusive on her performance.

The Walt Whitman poem that Bette Davis reads (just before leaving Cascades) is "The Untold Want" from Songs of Parting (just 2 lines): "The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,/ Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find."

Bette Davis had walked out of Warner Bros. before the making of this movie and refused to play Charlotte Vale. According to Ginger Rogers, she had been given the script to read as a replacement of Davis and was desperate to play Charlotte. Davis got wind of this and came back to the studio, playing the character that was originally intended for her. Rogers said that she "would have given anything to play Charlotte Vale - even if I did let Jack L. Warner beat me at tennis!"

Hal B. Wallis cut a scene in which Lisa takes Charlotte to a beauty parlour before her ocean voyage, so that the audience first sees the transformed Bette Davis at the same time as the ship's passengers. He also cut a silent dream sequence in which the young Charlotte dances with the ship's officer with whom she was once in love.

The screenplay is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, except that in the book, Charlotte takes a cruise in the Mediterranean, not to South America.

The sparkly brooch Ilka Chase wears in the family scene is the same one worn by Ingrid Bergman on her white suit when she first enters Rick's in Casablanca. Joan Crawford wears the same brooch in Mildred Pierce when she asks Monty to marry her. The patio chairs in the Now, Voyager Rio lunch scene are the same ones used in Casablanca outside Rick's and auctioned in Bonham's, NY. Studios reused props, costumes, sets for several movies.

Orry-Kelly designed all 30 costumes Bette Davis wore in the film.

Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.

You can get this film as part of a collection here…

Or follow me along in trying to complete the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" here… (This is the latest edition my book is much older…)