H.M. PULHAM, ESQUIRE (1941)

Film director King Vidor is often associated with large-scale motion pictures such as The Big Parade, the silent-era war film that made MGM into Hollywood’s top studio, and War and Peace, where Tolstoy’s sprawling Napoleonic saga gets told over three-and-a-half hours. But Vidor was also adept at intimate stories of American life, at tales told with humor, romance and a generous sprinkling of home-grown satire. Such a film is H. M. Pulman, Esquire, his 1941 adaptation of John P. Marquand’s novel about a conservative, middle-aged businessman reconsidering a life dominated by the routine conventions of society. Starring Robert Young (“a director’s dream,” Vidor one said), Hedy Lamarr, Ruth Hussey and Charles Coburn, the bittersweet story looks at a blue-blooded Bostonian who outwardly believes he’s happy but suddenly gets a couple of phone calls that cause him to wonder if he truly is.

After the screening enjoy a post-film discussion about the with film critic and friend of Vidor, Kirk Honeycutt

KIRK HONEYCUTT BIO

Kirk Honeycutt is a longtime film critic, journalist, teacher, author and a good friend of King Vidor. Kirk was a senior film reporter and then chief film critic for The Hollywood Reporter for 20 years ending in 2012. Before that, he was chief film critic and feature writer for The Daily News of Los Angeles for over seven years. He wrote the biography John Hughes: A Life in Film, published in 2015, and later this year Sideways Uncorked: The Perfect Pairing of Film and Wine, a book he wrote with his wife Mira Advani Honeycutt, will be published on the 20th anniversary of that film’s release.
Kirk has contributed to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Film, Cosmopolitan, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, and other publications. Two of his screenplays were produced, Final Judgment (1992) starring Brad Dourif, Isaac Hayes, and Karen Black and Death Spa (1989). As an adjunct professor at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts (2012 to 2016) he taught a variety of courses including film history, criticism, and screenplay analysis. He hosted UCLA Extension’s Sneak Preview film series from 2005 to 2015.
He lives in Paso Robles, California with his wife.