H.M. Pulham, Esq.

The story is melancholy and bittersweet, but it's so well done that this lengthy film flits by in no time. Marquand's superb novel of Boston's high society and the forlorn love affair of one of its leading citizens are memorably captured by director Vidor. Young is Pulham, the product of a wealthy, stuffy Bostonian family, who thinks back 20 years on a successful but sedate career as he begins to pen his memoirs. The one exciting period of an otherwise dull existence is the time Young has spent in New York where, in the 1920s, he fell in love with the beautiful Lamarr, a copywriter. A country girl from Iowa, she has no use for his high-society background, but is at...