H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching because it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (or at least was last I checked) is H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Robert Young plays Harry Moulson Pulham, who at the start of the movie is in his late 40s and, one can guess, a lawyer in private practice in Boston. He comes from the upper-crust of Boston society and lives the sort of "proper" life you expect from Bostonians of that era; think the Vales in Now, Voyager before Bette Davis insists on having that nervous breakdon. Mr. Pulham has a wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) and two children, and walks the dog every morning before walking to the office.

On this particular day, however, a couple of things shake up his routine. One is a call from Rodney Brown, nicknamed "Bo-Jo" (Leif Ericson). Brown was one of Pulham's friends from Harvard back in the day, and with their 25th class reunion coming up, wants to get together with all the friends and do some capsule bios of their lives in the quarter-century following graduation. The other is a message from a then young woman that Pulham knew from working with her in New York a few years after graduation, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr). She's up in Boston, and invites Harry to see her at a partciular hotel. He goes, and looks at her, but can't brin himself to actually talk to her again....

Flash back to early in Harry's life, long before even meeting Marvin. He had a wealthy father in John Pulham (Charles Coburn) married to Mrs. Pulham (no first name given and played by Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies), and went to the right schools, even knowing Kay from a fairly early age but not caring for her because she, like a lot of the Boston families, are from stuffy stock. Then he goes off to Harvard and, after graduation, goes off to fight in World War I (the movie was actually released the week before Pearl Harbor; do the math).

World War I changed a lot of people, and Pulham seems to be one of them. He's not so certain he wants to go back to Boston, and one of his more liberal friends from Harvard, Bill King (Van Heflin), gets Pulham a job in advertising in New York, something that would scandalize the family, as this isn't exactly the most respectable job out there. Marvin is a copyrwiter at the agency, and Marvin and Harry seem to work a lot together.

Unsurprisingly, they fall in love too, although we know at the very beginning that they don't wind up together in the final reel since Harry and Kay are married in 1941. It turns out that Harry brings Bill and Marvin up to Boston to meet the family one weekend. Harry's kid sister Mary (Bonita Granville) likes Marvin, and Mom professes to, but Marvin understands that the whole familiy is so tradition-bound and stuffy that this could never be the place for her. But don't Marvin and Harry love each other?

H.M. Pulham, Esq. is one of those movies that MGM made well, much like Madame Bovary which I mentioned several weeks ago. Unfortunately, in the case of H.M. Pulham, Esq., the plot is a bit maddening. Harry and Marvin's reasons for breaking up just make me shrug my head and wonder why either of them thought they'd go on to live happily ever after snubbing each other.

So, while H.M. Pulham, Esq. is a stylish and well-acted movie, it's in service of a script that definitely has its problems. But, as always, judge for yourself.