Donald Clarke: Hollywood stopped putting women at the heart of stories in the 1940s

Nineteen forty-two was a great year for American handkerchief manufacturers. The top two films at the US box office were Random Harvest, in which Greer Garson saves Ronald Colman from amnesia, and Mrs Miniver, in which Greer Garson saves England from the Nazis.

It says something about the quality of Hollywood's output that the greatest weepie of the year – perhaps the greatest of all time – couldn't quite make it into the year's top 10. Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager has just been reissued in a shiny new print and it remains as eccentric, manipulative and stubbornly moving as it was eight decades ago. Others may reasonably argue for All About Eve as the definitive Bette Davis vehicle, but, already positioning that actor as a fading force, Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1950 film sits just outside her high period. Eight years earlier, Davis was still among the most powerful priestesses of the Hollywood temple.

Now, Voyager joins with Mildred Pierce from 1945 to form twin peaks in the golden age of the American “woman’s film”. We can pick apart the representational problems in those entertainments – the sphere is invariably domestic, conventional values are reinforced – but it remains undeniable that, following the diminution of that quasi-genre in the late 1950s, mainstream Hollywood has never again so consistently placed women at the heart of its stories. For all the much-ballyhooed revolutions of the early 1970s, the defining films still tended to follow the adventures of this Nicholson or that Pacino or that other De Niro.

It is hardly worth worrying about what we would now call ableist tropes. Now, Voyager is a finely honed romantic machine and, as it picks up pace, those spluttering noises cease to be audible above the viewer's pathetic sobbing

Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, Now, Voyager was much celebrated as one of the first Hollywood movies to engage with psychoanalysis. It is, however, unlikely that many contemporary shrinks would agree with the diagnoses and treatments here offered.

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Davis plays Charlotte, the repressed, despondent daughter of an apparently ancient dowager (Dame Gladys Cooper was, in fact, just 53 when she played the role), who dominates her Boston townhouse with puritanical zeal. The film begins with Doctor Jaquith (the sly, wry Claude Rains) being inveigled into the home and concluding that Charlotte is "most seriously ill". His solution is plenty of tennis and weaving at a posh resort in the country. We are eventually convinced she has achieved at least partial recovery.

Why do we think that? Because, according to Professor Hollywood, mentally ill people are overweight, wear glasses and don’t go to the hairdresser. When she appears on the gangplank of a cruise ship – a shot that surely inspired Kate Winslet’s first appearance in Titanic – she is thin, sharply dressed and coiffed to within an inch of her life. That is to say, she looks sane.

It is hardly worth worrying about what we would now call ableist tropes. Now, Voyager is a finely honed romantic machine and, as it picks up pace, those spluttering noises cease to be audible above the viewer's pathetic sobbing. There is an architect named Jerry Durrance on the ship, and he is played by lovely Paul Henreid, an actor whose decency always overpowers his colourlessness. Soon, zipping about rainy South America, they take shelter in a shed and do "something" that is never properly clarified. It must have been "something" truly awful, because they go all shivery and flustered whenever it is again mentioned.

Why have we never again seen a period when Hollywood – albeit largely the men of Hollywood – made so many films for and about women?

Anyway, Jerry is married to an awful woman who, Charlotte concludes, is doing to their daughter Tina what her mother once did to her. Temporarily back in Jaquith’s jug, Charlotte meets Tina and takes on the role of a surrogate mother. Complete happiness is, however, almost always denied the protagonist of the woman’s picture, and, fearful of society’s disapproval, the sometime couple agree to see each other only socially. In an unmistakable gesture to one kind of “something”, Jerry, as he did during their first intimate conversation, lights two cigarettes simultaneously in his mouth and passes one to Charlotte.

But will they be happy? “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars,” she says. You can have your “Nobody’s perfect”. There is the best last line in American cinema.

Now, Voyager is, in short, a flawed film that is absolutely perfect. Our early awareness that the female protagonist, like Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce, is doomed to self-sacrifice does rankle, but Davis’s terrifying assurance confirms that Charlotte really will make the best of things. It bristles with comedy. It orchestrates its emotional catharses with a rigour that Mahler might envy. For all the nodding to societal norms, it allows its female characters enormous strength.

What happened? Why have we never again seen a period when Hollywood – albeit largely the men of Hollywood – made so many films for and about women? Television had a lot to do with it. Soap operas stole some of that audience. Later, in the years after Star Wars, the industry became addicted to a school of heroic bluster that still hasn’t gone away.

Don’t ask for the moon. We still have Now, Voyager. Go and see it gleam this weekend.

Now, Voyager is on limited release