“I want the house” is such a common sentiment in films about women that is used in a dramatically contrary way to illustrate what a different kind of woman the leading lady is in H. M. Pulham, Esq. Hedy Lamarr plays the glamorous and beautiful Marvin Myles, another in a series of 1940s heroines who have masculine names. She is definitely a liberated woman, and as such is both the romantic ideal the hero loves and the woman who is wrong, wrong, wrong for him. She has her own apartment, drinks cocktails, and puts makeup on in public, three things that good women presumably do not do. Marvin knows what she wants out of life: a butler, riches, things, but also the right to work for her own living. Without that she says, she would shrink, “There would be nothing left of me.”
Of course, in watching hundreds of old movies, one becomes familiar with the female character who wants independence until she falls in love and changes her mind, or for the hero to make her see how wrong she is. In H.M.Pulham, Esq, that moment never comes. When Marvin firmly explains that she is not made to be at sewing circles or out buying drapes, Pulham (Robert Young) tells her, “You are wrong, because you’ll have a home of your own someday.” Marvin yells out, “I don’t just want a house!”
This brands her truly subversive heroine, and one who is not destined to be with a man at the final clinch. Marvin explains clearly to Pulham that if there is to be a house, she will buy it herself. She feels she is defined by her work and her independent world. If she marries him and goes to his world, she will be without status of her own; her only status will be his status. In the end they do not marry, and she goes on to get her butler, her riches, her yacht, and even a husband whom she marries just because she thinks he resembles Pulham. She has her success and her money, and although she doesn’t look particularly happy, the film doesn’t take it away from her. She didn’t want a house which meant she was rejecting a woman’s world.
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