Only Hollywood could mix Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud and come up with a first-class weepie like Now, Voyager. Bette Davis is at her best as a woman who starts out wretchedly oppressed and homely, and ends up happily oppressed and handsome. Her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper), having fashioned her into the ideal spinster-slave, is taken aback when Davis's sensibly shod Charlotte Vale suffers a nervous breakdown, whereupon psychiatrist Claude Rains prescribes a therapeutic cruise. Charlotte sails forth, guiltily clad in a more stylish friend's clothes, “playing” upper-crust beauty, and pulling it off-on the outside. Sufficiently freed from her complexes to fall in love with the (predictably) married Paul Henreid, Charlotte trades in her family's neuroses for his. Without the good doctor to narrate to, Charlotte shares her inner voice, and sense of alienation from her image, with-well, us. Now, Voyager is the quintessential “transformation” film. But we're in on Charlotte Vale/Veil's secret: not healed, but at least in heels.