be sure to get home before dark

If you are a fan of classic films, or especially fond of the Bette Davis tearjerker, Now, Voyager (1942), then I highly recommend you watch Home Before Dark (1958).  Made almost 20 years after the Davis classic, Home Before Dark shares some striking things in common.  Both are about shy, New England girls driven almost mad by the women in their families, their self-esteem shrinking to the vanishing point.  Comparisons between the two films are tantalizing, though I believe each is fascinating in its own right.  I have become very taken with the more obscure Home Before Dark, which has recently been issued on Warner Archive dvd (MOD).

In Now, Voyager, a young Bostonian woman named Charlotte Vale has lived long enough under the rigid thumb of her autocratic mother, played with splendid grandeur and egotism by Dame Gladys Cooper, one of Great Britain's gifts to the 20th century stage and cinema, to have become a mere, dowdy shadow of a woman.  Charlotte Vale, being allowed little freedom to think, develop her own personality or possess any private life even after reaching adulthood first appears to us in the guise of Bette Davis' heavy browed, well-padded frumpy old maid.  We learn that under her mother's dominance Charlotte was bullied into a suffocating existence where her appearance, friends, social activities, even the books she was permitted to read were all rigorously supervised and molded by Mrs. Vale.  All of this eventually leads to Charlotte's breakdown and hospitalization, much to the humiliation of her mother.

Home Before Dark takes the viewer on a similar track from precarious recovery, down into insanity and back home again.

In 1958, Mervyn LeRoy, a veteran studio director who had great success in guiding actresses to outstanding performances playing characters driven to the edge (see Vivien Leigh in Waterloo Bridge, the actress's favorite of her films; and the unforgettable young Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed) was assigned to direct an adaptation of Eileen Bassing's novel, Home Before Dark.  Jean Simmons was cast in the lead role of Charlotte Bronn, the young New England girl married to professor Arnold Bronn (Irish actor, Dan O'Herlihy).  The story begins where Now, Voyager takes several scenes to arrive:  at a mental hospital (in reality, Danvers State Insane Asylum), not so stately as Charlotte Vale's "Cascade", where Dr. Bronn arrives to take his wife home to Marblehead, Mass. (many of the film's exteriors were shot on location there and lend the film a frosty, New England authenticity) after a long battle with mental illness.

 
It is upon the return of the young-faced but frosty-haired Charlotte into a tangled domestic life that we realize "home" was the cause of her all her problems and her first breakdown.  Charlotte, in trying to resume a normal life is caught on the one hand between her desire to be close to a husband who constantly pulls back in barely concealed repulsion, and by her step-mother and step-sister who run her home, make all decisions for her and whose company Arnold clearly prefers.  Charlotte has not experienced a "normal" home environment since the death of her mother and so it takes time for her realize that her difficulty with adjustment lies not in herself alone, but in the fact that insanity results from expecting different results from the same behavior.  In Charlotte's case, only by changing her circumstances and realizing the truth about those closest to her can she regain health and healing.

It is telling that the house itself actually belongs to Charlotte, it being her father and mother's home originally.  Her mother died when she was little and left her father bereft, alcoholic and unable to care for Charlotte, prompting opportunistic family acquaintance, Inez Winthrop (Mabel Albertson) to install herself as caretaker until---and long after---his death.  Inez's daughter, Joan (Rhonda Fleming) became Charlotte's idol and rival and loomed as large in her frail consciousness as an alter ego.  Charlotte never learned to assert her position as the true mistress of the house or to request her "in laws" find another abode.

It is in these twisted relationships that the movie develops a sub-theme about weaker,  sensitive and fragile people being at the mercy of more assertive, pragmatic opportunists.  Bronn, himself an emotionally locked man of enormous ego and academic ambitions, married Charlotte only because she desired him first and drew his attention by putting on airs of the flirtatious extrovert---in other words, her sister Joan.  Bronn regrets his marriage once Charlotte drops the fiction, and yet he seems as obtusely unaware of his growing attachment to Joan, the woman who possesses all the qualities he really admires, as Charlotte is in energetically denying there could be any attraction between them.  It was all dreamed up in her own mind, she constantly tells herself and all her acquaintances who have evidence to the contrary.  This denial was one facet of her breakdown and illness, one which in hospital she was evidently encouraged to question and renounce as an invention of her own envy and jealousy toward her step-sister.

 
Jean Simmons' performance is brilliant and delicate, filled with many painful moments where the actress peels away layer after layer of aching vulnerability and fears while tremulously balancing the character of Charlotte with a mind obviously bright and witty and a heart full of affection and desire for her husband.  In her precarious state, the normal need for love and physical affection from her increasingly hostile husband becomes a myopia and obsession.  Sadly, Charlotte's real madness lay in denying the worst truth any human can face: that of being unloved by our beloved.  The final revelation of this truth is as difficult to watch as anything I've seen in movies, and calls to mind Bette Davis' equally tormented confession of her lifelong humiliations to psychologist Dr. Jaquith (Claude Raines).

There is no kindly doctor on hand to guide Charlotte Bronn, she must make her agonizing way back home from the dark alone.  The only bright spot in her world is found in the support and esteem shown by two male admirers, old beau Hamilton Gregory (Stephen Dunne) whose character name recalls a ship-board flirtation between Davis and a dashing polo player named Hamilton, and a newly arrived professor, Jake Diamond (Efram Zimbalist, jr.), who rooms with the Bronn family and witnesses their parade of fact and fantasy.

Now, Voyager concludes with an indeterminate relationship between Charlotte Vale and a married man (Paul Henreid) just as Home Before Dark leaves it somewhat vague as to whether Charlotte Bronn will end up with Jake, but in each case it is the journey to self-awareness that both films successfully navigate.  It's not easy to get inside a distorted mind and yet keep the audience objective enough to discern reality from what the characters perceive.  Both accomplish this well and it is really worth your while to watch both films in succession.  Their similarities are finally sealed by the use of the same musical motif for each "Charlotte" character, written for earlier film by Max Steiner and orchestrated for Home Before Dark by Ray Heindorf.

Judge for yourself which of the two films you feel best captures the state of mind of a young woman trapped in an unhappy New England home, or just enjoy each for their unique qualities and excellent performances by two gifted actresses.