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| Hedy Lamarr and Robert Young |
H. M. PULHAM, ESQ. (1941). Director: King Vidor. Based on a novel by John P. Marquand.
Harry Pulham (Robert Young), a successful businessman with a mansion, wife and children, thinks back on his life and remembers the woman he fell in love with but didn't marry twenty years earlier. The oddly named Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr) is another copy writer in a firm where the young Harry is employed, and the two gradually fall in love. But Marvin is too independent to want to be a proper Bostonian wife, and Harry eventually marries someone else. Thinking that his marriage to wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) has been a failure, he goes to see Marvin again ...
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| Paging Marcus Welby? Robert Young |
H. M. Pulham, Esq. has several notable features: an excellent performance by Hedy Lamarr [
Algiers], which is generally considered the best of her career; a very good performance from Young [
Honolulu], who seems superficial and miscast at first but handles subsequent scenes beautifully; a memorable supporting cast which includes Charles Coburn and Fay Holden as Harry's parents, Van Heflin as his buddy, and Hussey as his wife; and a truly lovely ending which explains the whole point and purpose of an enduring marriage between two people. Bronislau Kaper's [
Them] score is also of note, as is King Vidor\s direction. In a two-shot with Young and Lamarr she leans back and falls into shadow, forecasting her eventual disappearance from his life.
Verdict: Interesting study of one man's life and loves. ***.
2 comments:
Would like to see this one; I also like the 1930s and 1940s Robert Young--very adorable. I too first saw him as the elderly, kindly Dr. Welby, but then when I saw him as Shirley Temple's rich young sugar daddy in Stowaway (1936), I fell in love! He was so cute!
-C
He was a good-looking man and played a variety of roles, occasionally evil, in his youth. But then he was cemented in people's minds as the kindly "Father" who Knows Best and Marcus Welby, and like Fred MacMurray, most TV fans did not know of his earlier career as a Hollywood leading man.
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