Seeking Lessons in Life From Stars Who Traveled Across the Silver Screen

The movie is “Now, Voyager.” Paul Henreid (as Jerry Durrance, the attractive married man) and Bette Davis (playing Charlotte Vale, the late-blooming Boston spinster) are standing on a balcony looking at the lights of Rio de Janeiro. He puts two cigarettes in his mouth, lights both and gives one to her. On the couch, clutching the remote, I feel my heart in my throat.

In the 1942 movie, Durrance and Vale fall in love on a cruise ship but can’t spend their lives together because he’s married. Still, “Now, Voyager” is my idea of an uplifting movie because of what it says about women who travel. On her own, Vale finds strength, purpose and independence. She doesn’t get her man. She gets something better: herself.

I know it’s just a movie. But ever since I saw “The Wizard of Oz” and started yearning for ruby slippers, movies have shaped me as a traveler. A handful of Hollywood classics from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s explicitly about women travelers made me want to see the world and gave me the courage, chiefly by providing such excellent role models as Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 movie “Roman Holiday,” Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve,” made in 1941, and Katharine Hepburn in the 1951 classic “The African Queen.”

Movies about women travelers are a minuscule genre because when these films were made, women seldom traveled and almost never traveled alone. In films like “Now, Voyager” and the 1934 screwball comedy “It Happened One Night,” starring Claudette Colbert, women travelers are depicted as escapees or useless spinsters.

“When a woman travels in film, it is usually because her life is not going well. She’s looking for something,” says Rick Jewell, a professor of film history at USC.

What she usually finds is a man, which tends to strike contemporary viewers as sexist. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice surprising qualities in Hollywood’s women travelers. They may fall in love while roaming the world, but they also shake up their lives and discover new things about themselves, like Katharine Hepburn as the high-collared Rose Sayer in “The African Queen.” She runs the dangerous rapids and then says, breathlessly, “I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating.”

“Now, Voyager,” whose title is taken from a line in Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (“Now voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find”), is something of an anomaly because its heroine ends up without her hero. Romantically inclined viewers can take comfort in knowing that she gets to raise her lover’s daughter as her own--the girl’s own mother doesn’t care for her--yielding Vale’s unforgettable last lines to Durrance: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

My favorite scene is when Vale gets off the cruise ship in New York. Her waiting relatives are dumbfounded by her transformation from neurotic spinster to lovely, polished woman of the world. She may never marry, but by traveling, she has found an identity for herself that has nothing to do with being a Miss or a Mrs.

It’s hard to stay mad at other classics about traveling women that are hopelessly romantic, like “An Affair to Remember,” a 1957 hankie douser in which Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant also fall in love on a cruise ship. And there’s “The Lady Eve,” starring Henry Fonda as a rich herpetologist (“I’ve been up the Amazon for a year, and they don’t use perfume”) and Stanwyck as a seductive cardsharp on yet another cruise ship who thinks of a moonlit deck as her “business office.” Or “Summertime,” from 1955, with Katharine Hepburn playing the spinster again, this time in Venice, Italy.

Surpassing all these is the deliriously romantic “It Happened One Night,” about a road trip undertaken by Colbert as spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews and Clark Gable as newspaper reporter Peter Warne. It’s hard to forget the “Walls of Jericho” scene, with the couple sharing quarters in a motor court, and the famed hitchhiking sequence (“I’ll stop a car, and I won’t use my thumb,” says Colbert’s Andrews, lifting her hem to show a little leg).

What I love about this film is Andrews’ pluckiness as she encounters the rougher forms of travel all too familiar to the lower classes--on foot, by bus and even by stolen car. She shows her real stuff on the loopy trip up the Eastern seaboard. At one point, Warne says he’s looking for the kind of woman who’d run into the surf with him on a deserted island in the Pacific: “Somebody that’s real, somebody that’s alive. Where ya gonna find her?” he asks. The answer is close at hand, of course, and the ideal he describes is just the sort of traveler I aim to be, even without a Gable on my deserted island.

A few movies have shown me the kind of traveler I don’t want to be, like the busload of ninnies touring Mexico with Richard Burton as the defrocked minister T. Lawrence Shannon in the 1964 movie version of Tennessee Williams’ play “The Night of the Iguana.” And who would want to end up like “Thelma and Louise”? This 1991 women’s travel classic takes its stars, Susan Sarandon as Louise and Geena Davis as Thelma, on a suicidal road trip across the Southwest after they’ve both become unintentional outlaws. Nevertheless, they grow while they’re on the road. Louise finds she has a heart, and Thelma learns she has the nerve to disregard her ridiculous husband. And I will never forget what Thelma says when she locks a highway patrolman in the trunk of his car: “My husband wasn’t sweet to me. Look how I turned out.”

So here’s my travel wish list from the movies: Thelma’s steel (even though I don’t plan to do harm to any police officers), the grit of Miss Rose in “The African Queen,” Audrey Hepburn’s wide-open eyes in “Roman Holiday,” Stanwyck’s panache as “The Lady Eve,” Colbert’s spunk, Davis’ elegance and, of course, Dorothy’s slippers.