Now, Voyager (1942)

Academy Awards, USA 1943

Won Oscar	Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture Max Steiner
Nominated Oscar	Best Actress in a Leading Role Bette Davis
	Best Actress in a Supporting Role Gladys Cooper

Warner Bros.
Directed by Irving Rapper
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Turner Classic Movies)

Aging spinster Bette Davis, complete with eyeglasses and absurdly bushy eyebrows, lives in a Boston mansion with her domineering mother. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Bette retires to a sanitarium in the country for a few months. She returns a new woman, literally: chic, sophisticated and with pencil-thin eyebrows. She immediately takes a cruise to Brazil where she has an affair with a married man. Back home, she tries to forget him and even gets engaged to another man, but all for naught. He shows up again years later and sends his own teenage daughter to the same sanitarium, where Bette adopts her as the child they never had. Neatly left out of the story is his own wife, who seems to have no say in the matter. It's a ridiculous soap opera made tolerable by Bette's usual superior performance.