What's His Name

Summary

Blakeville’s Main Street hums on sepia nitrate: Harvey, the soda-spark king, pirouettes a silver spigot like a maestro’s baton, doling out fizz-kisses to every gossiping mouth while coins clink a pauper’s lullaby. Three winters of marital threadbare bliss later, the travelling musical-comedy caravan rolls in, a gaudy Trojan horse of footlights and spangles. Nellie, restless mercury to Harvey’s steady tin, steps onstage; the footlights baptise her ambition, the greasepaint eats her past. Harvey, now the troupe’s anonymous stagehand dubbed merely “What’s His Name,” carries props in the wings and watches his wife ascend into the helium of applause. Enter the silk-lined millionaire—his name is money—who spirits Nellie to Reno’s quickie altars of unmarriage. Harvey, clutching moppet Phoebe like a rag-doll relic, retreats to Blakeville’s cracked sidewalks. The child’s fever becomes the film’s final curtain call, summoning both parents to her bedside where greasepaint and nickelodeon dreams dissolve into one chiaroscuro embrace, the marriage certificate magically re-inked by the solvent of a shared tear.

Synopsis

Soda jerk Harvey is the most popular man in Blakeville, New York, and deliriously happy through three years of poverty-stricken marriage to Nellie. When a musical-comedy comes through town, Nellie becomes and actress and tag-along Harvey becomes "What's His Name." When Nellie falls for a millionaire and goes to Reno for a divorce, Harvey takes their child Phoebe home, where her later illness brings her parents back together.