H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)

Harry Pulham (Robert Young) has always lived his life by the book.  He came from a wealthy background, went to all the right schools, has a respectable job, has two children, and is married to Kay Motford (Ruth Hussey), an ideal woman for a man of his stature.  Now middle-aged, he meets up with some of his old college friends for lunch one day and is put in charge of getting all their classmates’ biographies together for their 25-year reunion.  Later, he gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr) inviting him out for a drink.  He accepts, but when he gets to the restaurant and sees her again, he can’t bear to talk to her.

He goes home and starts to write his biography, but when he starts looking back on his life, he realizes that he has never lived life on his own terms.  Everything he’s done in life has been because his family expected it of him.  After graduating from Harvard, he fights in World War I, and after the war, his college friend Bill (Van Heflin) gets him a job at an advertising agency in New York City.  Marvin was working at the same agency and was kind of a 1940s Peggy Olson.  Bill had certainly never met an independent girl like Marvin in any of his upper-class schools and they soon fall deeply in love with each other.

However, Harry’s family back home in Boston just doesn’t understand his new life.  His parents (Charles Coburn and Fay Holden) wish he would just come home and settle down with Kay, who he has known since he was a child.  Harry has never had any real interest in Kay and certainly doesn’t want to marry her, but he wants to marry Marvin instead.  But Marvin isn’t ready to get married yet and she realizes she just doesn’t fit in with Harry’s privileged background.  They go their separate ways, but Marvin promises to always be waiting for him if he wants to come back to her.  Harry decides to settle into his predetermined life in Boston and marry Kay, even though he doesn’t really love her.  After looking back on it all, he decides to call Marvin back to see if her offer still stands.  They meet for lunch, but are still things still the same between them?

I loved this movie!  First of all, this is a King Vidor movie through and through.  It reminded me a bit of The Crowd in the sense that both movies deal with men who aren’t satisfied with where they’re at in life and are yearning for something more.  This is the kind of material that King Vidor was best suited to direct.  The cast in general was pretty stellar; Robert Young and Hedy Lamarr had good chemistry together.  Hedy Lamarr may seem like kind of an odd choice to play a free-spirited, independent woman, but she gave a very thoughtful and nuanced performance.  Ruth Hussey, Van Heflin, and Charles Coburn were all excellent supporting players.  My only complaint about it is that it could have stood being about fifteen minutes shorter.  But if you’re in the mood for something bittersweet, I very highly recommend H.M. Pulham, Esq.  It’s another one of those overlooked gems that deserves to be better remembered today.

The Uninvited (1944)

Have you ever gone someplace on vacation and wished you could impulsively buy a house and live there?  Well when brother and sister Rick (Ray Milland) and Pamela (Ruth Hussey) Fitzgerald take a vacation on the Devonshire Coast, that’s just what they do.  While walking with their dog one day, the dog starts chasing a squirrel and they lead Rick and Pamela to a beautiful, old, abandoned house.  They take a look around the house and fall in love with the place.  Both of them would love to buy it, and although Rick has some reservations, Pamela insists that they should go through with it ASAP.  They go to see the house’s owner Commander Beach (Donald Crisp) to make an offer on the place, but when they arrive, he isn’t at home.  Instead they meet Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), his granddaughter.  At first, Stella is very friendly with them, but she suddenly turns cold when she finds out why they were there.  The house they want to buy had once belonged to her mother, who died on the property when she was very young.  When Commander comes home again, Stella begs him not to sell the house.  But ultimately, he’s so desperate to be rid of the place since the maintenance is so expensive that he gladly accepts the Fitzgeralds’ very low offer.  Well, that and he believes the house is haunted.

When the Commander mentions that some of the house’s past occupants had complained about the house being haunted, Rick and Pamela aren’t fazed at all.  They’re eager to move in and go back to the house to look around some more.  This time they find a large artist’s studio with a great ocean view that for some reason, Pam thinks is the one ugly room in the house.  Even though Rick thinks it’d be a great space for him to work in, there’s no denying that the room has an eerie chill in there.  Plus they notice their dog refuses to go upstairs for some reason.  The next day, as Rick is getting ready to go back home to get their things, he hears more rumors about the house being haunted from the local store clerk.  Before he leaves town, he runs into Stella, who apologizes for being rude to them before.  Rick has no hard feelings toward Stella, actually he’s attracted to her, and the two of them end up spending the afternoon sailing together.  The two end up becoming friends and before he leaves town, he invites Stella to come by the house to visit Pamela while he’s away.

Rick returns to find that Pamela has done wonderful job of getting the house in shape while he was away.  But that night, Rick and Pamela hear some mysterious sobbing and begin to think that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to the rumors about the place being haunted.  They start trying to find out more about the history of the place and deduce that it must be haunted by the ghost of Stella’s mother.  The Commander is truly upset by this idea and doesn’t want Stella to have anything to do with the Fitzgeralds, but one night, she sneaks over to their house anyway.  Stella senses a spirit in the house and believes it to be her mother, but while Rick is playing a song for her on the piano, Stella suddenly starts running toward the cliff that her mother had fallen off of.  Rick stops her in time, but Stella has no memory of how she got there.  Before they get back inside, they hear their maid Lizzie screaming about something.  She had seen a mist in the shape of a woman in the studio and when Stella goes to investigate, the room turns suddenly cold and she faints.  They send for Dr. Scott (Alan Napier) to check on her and he spends the rest of the night telling them about how Stella’s father had an affair with a woman named Carmel and Carmel was the one who pushed Stella’s mother off the cliff.

When Dr. Scott says Stella is well enough to leave, they decide that it’s not safe for her to come back.  But knowing that Stella isn’t going to want to stay away from the house, they decide to stage a séance and fix it to make her believe that the ghost of her mother wants her to stay out of the house.  During the séance, Rick and Dr. Scott do their best to make the Ouija board say what they want it to, but a ghost does take over and tells Stella that she should stay.  Not only that, it also becomes clear that there are two ghosts, not one: Stella’s mother and Carmel.  But their séance is interrupted by the Commander who has come to take Stella away.  The next day, Rick starts talking to Lizzie about how they want to know more about the incident between Stella’s mother and Carmel, but all the people directly involved with the incident are now dead.  Lizzie mentions that Miss Holloway, a close friend of Stella’s mother, is still alive and is running a sanitarium.  Rick and Pamela go to see Miss Holloway, but what they don’t know is that the Commander had brought Stella to Miss Holloway’s.  But when they find out, they try to go back for Stella only to find that Stella has been sent back to the Fitzgeralds’.  When they get back home again, they find that one of the ghosts has something important to tell them.

When it comes to horror movies, I tend to go for movies that are creepy and eerie rather than gory so The Uninvited was right up my alley.  I was impressed by how much it seemed like a real ghost story.  This story was something like you would hear on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or one of the many ghost-related shows the Biography channel plays every Saturday.  But The Uninvited is far superior to any Unsolved Mysteries reenactment.  I loved the acting and the general atmosphere of the movie.  This is a perfect movie to watch on a cool, rainy October night.  It’s a perfect Halloween movie and I’m not sure why it took me this long to get around to seeing it.