This is the film which almost invented chick flick/romantic weepies as a genre (''Oh Jerry, lets not ask for the moon; we have the stars.'') It depicts the emergence of a repressed and emotionally abused spinster, Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale in one of her greatest outings on celluloid, as an independent spirit. Quite advanced for an early forties film, the film explores the theme of female liberation, the right of an unmarried woman to be an adult and to have her own life, not kept as a child and a chattel by unpleasant, manipulative and controlling relatives. It also deals intelligently with psychological problems centering on low self-esteem, and with the pain of frustrated love.
Perhaps the most lasting and remarkable insight of the film is the simplest: that in order to be loved and integrated as a human being in the company of others, you have to give love in return. The core romance between Charlotte and Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid, excellent) is the central story, but around it we see Charlotte building viable new relationships with relatives and family friends, to whom she has always previously been a clinging nuisance and embarressment. The only relationship which fails is that with her tyrannical mother: Charlotte tries her best but this woman cannot adjust to no longer being Charlottes owner and pocket tyrant, and in the end dies of a heart attack in the intensity of her thwarted bile. I am reminded of the utterly dysfunctional relationship between Jane Eyre and her guardian, Mrs Reed, in Charlotte Bronte's classic novel
Jane Eyre.
The part which I found more moving than the unconsumatable romance was the last section, where, in mourning for the mother who she loved and who never loved her back, and feeling guilty for her part in the quarrel which triggered her mother's fatal heart attack, Charlotte returns to the psychiatric clinic which first helped her and finds that Henreid's emotionally disturbed 12 year old daughter is there, a close facsimile of the 12 year old girl she herself once used to be. There is an instant bond of empathy and, expecting to be receiving treatment and support, Charlotte instead is thrown into the role of therapist and surrogate mother to this girl who is heartbroken and as lonely as could be, because she knows for a fact that her own mother hates her. Charlotte has been there and done that, and is uniquely placed to reach out to and rehabilitate this damaged child. In fact Tina is extremely good for Charlotte as well, banishing the ghosts of Charlotte's guilt and misery completely.
Its not full of cliches: its the film that got copied so much that the ideas which are original and inventive here became the cliches of romantic melodrama, right down to the gloriously OTT musical score by Max Steiner. Definitely a girls film, but I liked it anyway because its also damn good.