H. M. Pulham, Esq. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an amazingly good cineversion of John Phillips Marquand's best-selling novel of a New Englander going dutifully to seed. Mr. Marquand has told his story three times (the others: The Late George Apley, Wickford Point); Director King Vidor had only one shot at his. His ending is box office, his story not sharply pointed, but he does manage to convey the airless but comfortable feeling of Boston, the pitifully habit-bound horizon of his Pulham (Robert Young), and to turn out a half-dozen sequences that are superb cinema.
Pulham embodies the reflections of a Boston investment counsel when his 25th Class Reunion Committee asks him for a brief biography of his life. Back goes the camera into his well-to-do Boston upbringing, his "carryon" prep-school days at St. Swithin's; Harvard and culture; World War I and the Argonne; Manhattan and the advertising business; the girl he loved (Hedy Lamarr); his easy, fateful slide into his late father's (Charles Coburn) sinecure; his passionless marriage to his mother's choice (Ruth Hussey); his slightly bewildered, slightly querulous, slightly pathetic acceptance of his fate: a cushioned middle age, the deadly divinity of trivial things.
All this is seen through the eyes of Pulham, which puts him in every scene and makes the picture slow, talky, occasionally repetitious. But Robert Young's version of the inhibited, frustrated, baffled Boston gentleman who didn't have guts or brains enough to get out of his rut and stay out is a first-rate job.
Miss Lamarr—thanks to careful directing—is something of a revelation herself. Hitherto, the undulant Viennese has been asked to do little but stand around and slay the male section of the audience.
This time she has a part (Manhattan advertising copy writer) to play, and she plays it fairly well—despite her foreign accent, an inability to show any facial emotion but petulance, and a few clotheshorse mannerisms.
The camera has a lot to say in Pulham, and says it without mumbling. It has the picture's opening sequence all to itself: the boiled egg on the breakfast table, sugar and cream enriching the coffee, the morning paper in its rack, the absent-minded good-by kiss, the derby, the rubbers, the two peanuts for the squirrels on his walk to the office, the breathing exercises in the park, the cigar at the old stand, the musty office, the waiting letters on his desk, the clock at exactly 9 a.m. After that sequence, with hardly a spoken word, Harry Pulham is typed.
Much of Pulham's irony is blunted, if not denied, by the picture's pseudo-happy ending. Beauteous Miss Lamarr, rich, middleaged, married, still very desirable, comes to town on business and has a rendezvous with Pulham. Ancient yearnings stir under his stuffed shirt—in spite of the curt, hard-boiled way she interrupts their tryst to tell off a recalcitrant customer by telephone. An hour later his wife, who suspects him of feeling a little liverish, half-kittenishly, half-remorsefully entices him away to a weekend in the Berkshires.