The time is ‘Now’ for a little homage to Bette Davis

“Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

IN “The History Boys,” the adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play that lands in movie theaters Tuesday, actor Richard Griffiths (the estimable Uncle Monty in “Withnail & I”) incites his young charges, circa 1982, to extend their love of history beyond the traditional Western canon by performing the final scenes from popular films, a contest for money in which they try to stump him.

Rising to the challenge, two of them take to the front of the class to perform the emotional crescendo from “Now, Voyager,” the 1942 uber-melodrama starring Bette Davis as a homely spinster oppressed by her wealthy and emotionally unresponsive mother who finds conditional love on a South American cruise with married architect Paul Henreid.

Meanwhile, a quarter-century and a continent away, the Oscar season comedy “For Your Consideration,” Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy’s latest project (they satirized community theater in “Waiting for Guffman,” dog shows in “Best in Show” and folk music in “A Mighty Wind”), focuses on Catherine O’Hara as an aging actress who, on the strength of Internet rumor, succumbs to Oscar madness.

To establish her bona fides, O’Hara recites dialogue along with a late-night TV showing of Davis’ final scene in “Now, Voyager.”

The rather unwieldy title (at least to modern ears) is taken from Walt Whitman’s “The Untold Want” in “Songs of Parting,” which psychiatrist Claude Rains bequeaths to Davis as an admonition to leave the nest: “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted/Now, Voyager, sail thee forth, to seek and find.”

“Now, Voyager” did not garner Davis an Academy Award, although it might have if she had not won in 1936 for “Dangerous” and 1938 for “Jezebel.” (It elicited her sixth official nomination for best actress and remains her biggest commercial hit.)

Based on a novel by Olive Prouty Higgins, who also wrote “Stella Dallas” and was later a patroness of Sylvia Plath (and an undisguised character in “The Bell Jar”), the film was written by Casey Robinson (“Dark Victory,” which also garnered Davis an Oscar nomination) and was directed by Irving Rapper (“The Corn Is Green”), a former dialogue coach whom Davis hand-picked when she refused to work with Michael Curtiz.

It also marked the discovery of Henreid, who four times in the film lights two cigarettes simultaneously and gives one to Davis -- now a romantic staple bordering on cliche, and a gesture Henreid claimed he coined spontaneously (although Davis and George Brent had attempted something similar in “The Rich Are Always With Us,” 10 years earlier).

In the final scene, divided by convention but united in their hearts, the lovers accept their destiny -- to live apart but connected by a boundless love. “Shall we just have a cigarette on it?” Henreid asks, the ritual sealing their private covenant on “this little strip of land” they share.

“And will you be happy, Charlotte?” he asks.

“Oh, Jerry,” Davis says. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

Henreid, co-star Rains and producer Hal B. Wallis segued directly to “Casablanca” later that year. Bogart’s Rick is even introduced the same way as Davis’ Charlotte Vale -- 20 minutes into the film, with tight close-up shots of his hands, before we ever see his face.

Back to the present and “The History Boys.” Describing the pedagogical flourishes of Griffiths’ Hector, the affable professor and cultural polymath of the film, director Nicholas Hytner says, “All this stuff that he gets them enthused by is a ragbag -- they’re scraps of things that float through his head. He calls it tosh [rubbish] -- a sheer calculated silliness, an antidote to what he sees as the prevailing pomposity about literature. He says he didn’t ‘want to turn out boys who talked about literature, and their love of words -- words, said in that reverential way which is somehow Welsh.’ He doesn’t want reverence -- whether it’s tosh or T.S. Eliot. Bette Davis is the antidote to T.S. Eliot.

“I love his films,” Hytner adds when asked about Christopher Guest, himself the fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling in the County of Essex, and “Consideration’s” reference to “Now, Voyager.” “I wonder whether he saw ‘The History Boys?’ ” (Guest was unavailable for comment.)