Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.

I enjoy reading reviews of films and plays on some blogs, such as Siegfried's, so I thought I'd write one.

Now I haven't watched nearly enough films in my life, perhaps because it's quite rare for me to sit down for long enough. I'm not stating this as a positive trait: I think I have acquired an overdose of Work Ethic somewhere along the way.

So I'm quite a long way behind with my movies - over half a century in some cases. People are always saying to me "But you must have seen - - " and no, generally I haven't, though I love films, so it's strange.

This afternoon, determined to have a rest after a very busy week, I sat down and watched Now Voyager. It was made in 1942, so I'm sorry that the review is sixty-five years late, but I've never seen it before, and anyway, I wasn't born when it was made, so there. The title is taken from a poem by the American poet Walt Whitman.

It's about the spinster daughter of a rich Boston family, who is driven to a nervous breakdown by her domineering mother (played by Gladys Cooper, who's excellent).

The unattractive spinster daughter, whose unattractiveness seems mostly to consist of a nasty tweed suit, some glasses, a bit of padding and a bad hair day, meets a psychiatrist and in about ten minutes is transformed into someone slim, glamorous and looking exactly like Bette Davis.

Then she goes on a cruise, acquires some very sparkly frocks and falls in love with a married man.

All the settings are very luxurious and glamorous and I expect this particularly appealed to a grey, war-torn Britain.

Splendid acting from young Bette, but my main problem was that everywhere she went she took an orchestra with her, playing what seemed to my ear to be yards of mushy violins. The composer, Max Steiner, won an Oscar so clearly not everyone who saw it agreed with me - but there was no natural sound in the background anywhere, just music all the way through, and I just wanted it to stop, frankly.

Two things showed how long ago it was made: the Romantic Hero's Romantic Gesture was always to light two cigarettes, one for him and one for her. He wouldn't be doing that nowadays, oh no, not unless the plot involved a horrible death from lung cancer.

Nor would the heroine say, as Bette did, "Let's go to a Bohemian restaurant and be very gay and you can make love to me there." Two changed-language-use in one sentence.

But I thought the acting had stood the test of time: Bette Davis was more interesting than the men, I thought. They were clean-cut clones and I found it hard to tell one from the other, but perhaps that's because I've never been interested in men with clean-cut charm.

It must have been pretty cutting-edge at the time and now, of course, it isn't - - but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. I must watch more films.