H M Pulham, Esq

Plot

Harry Moulton Pulham Jr. (Robert Young) is a conservative, middle-aged Boston businessman, set in a precise daily routine. He has a proper wife, Kay (Ruth Hussey), with whom he has settled into a comfortable if passionless relationship. However, it was not always that way.

When Harry is saddled with the task of organizing a twenty-five-year college reunion, it triggers a flashback to a time more than twenty years earlier. After the end of World War I, his Harvard classmate and friend Bill King (Van Heflin) gets him a job in a New York City advertising company, where he falls in love with a vivacious, independent coworker oddly named Marvin Miles (Hedy Lamarr). However, though they love each other, she cannot bring herself to fit into his traditional idea of a wife's role and he cannot imagine living anywhere other than hidebound Boston. So they break off their relationship. Harry falls in love with and marries a woman from his own social set with the same attitudes and assumptions, someone approved of by his father (Charles Coburn) and mother (Fay Holden).

Harry is now profoundly dissatisfied with his dull routine. At breakfast, he begs his wife to go away with him immediately, to rekindle their love. She dismisses the idea as impractical and even silly. Harry calls Marvin and arranges to meet her again after these twenty years. He visits her apartment in the city. There are sparks, and Harry is tempted to have an affair. When she takes a phone call, we realize she, too, is married. They both realize they cannot recapture the past.

On the street after his lunch with Marvin, Harry sees his wife in the car trying to get his attention. She tells him she wants to go away with him as he suggested that morning, and he now says it is impractical, but she has canceled her appointments and packed their bags in the car and persuades him to go. He seems happy.

Cast