Word: pulham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Brown's Keys of the Kingdom, by A. J. Cronin (TIME, July 21), which has been at or near the top of the list ever since the week it came out. Runners-up were James Hilton's Random Harvest and John P. Marquand's H. M. Pulham, Esquire, both Little, Brown books. Other Little, Brown hits: Nordhoff and Hall's Botany Bay, C. S. Forester's The Captain from Connecticut, Erich Maria Remarque's Flotsam, Helen Maclnnes' Above Suspicion...
Recent graduates, however, and those familiar with the many Pulhams in New England and elsewhere, will feel that the choice of Robert Young for the title role was unwise. He never had a chance of putting it over completely. His acting is good, he obviously studied Pulham assiduously, but too many champagne and night club parts have branded him as a gay man-about-town and his manner sometimes typifies Park Avenue rather than Beacon Street. Furthermore, though his performance is as near-perfect as it could be under the circumstances, he suffers from the unfortunate handicap of not being...
King Vidor's touch is evident everywhere, and it is essentially his work that makes the picture hang together and follow the book so carefully. Charles Coburn is closer to Harvard, as Harry Pulham's father, than any one else in the cast. The drawbacks of the movie are few, however, and although some Harvard graduates may wince once or twice, America will swallow it all and love...