There's something wrong with Charlotte Vale, enough that the family has called in a noted psychiatrist, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). Charlotte, as played by Bette Davis in top form, is frumpy of course, but worse yet, she lives with a tyrannical mom who conceives of this unwanted child as a permanent, live-in... well, daughter. Dr. Jaquith sends Charlotte packing, with Walt Whitman's "Now voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find" as her therapy. Aboard a cruise ship, she seeks and finds a married man (Paul Henreid). New England Puritanism encounters Continental style; she learns to smoke, but not to light her own match. In true fairy-tale manner, she returns home, the ugly duckling no longer. "Happily-ever-after," however, is postponed to allow for a parallel story of another daughter damaged by life with Mom. When the two plot-lines inevitably meet, Charlotte resolves them by inventing a new type of family, with herself as mom. Now it she who lays down the law of the home, but to those weeping in the audience, it's clear she's sought and found her own oppression. -Kathy Geritz