If "The Pumpkin Eater" has a fault it is that it's so glacial, so cocooned in its world of upper-middle class ennui it may leave you feeling a little drained. Otherwise, this is quite close to perfection. Adapted, superbly and to the extent that he makes it his own, from Penelope Mortimer's novel, by Harold Pinter it tells the story of Jo, (Anne Bancroft), a thrice married mother of several children, (by all three husbands), whose life has started to spectacularly unravel. Jo seems to be the kind of woman who can't stop having children but who doesn't seem cut out for motherhood. Inflicting her existing brood on Jake, (Peter Finch), husband No. 3, does little for their marriage. Jake is an incorrigible philanderer or maybe he just can't stand being at home with a pack of screaming, spoiled brats. Then again he's 'a screen-writer' so his profession offers both glamour and the opportunity for multiple infidelities. Things come to a head when Jo has a mental breakdown 'in Harrods of all places' to quote Jake.
Being Pinter, the film is both elliptical and chilly. It's magnificently made, (the director is Jack Clayton), but you struggle to feel anything for Jo or Jake. It's a world that Pinter and company know well but the rest of us may well feel we are being kept at a distance. But don't let that put you off; if you want your mind engaged at the expense of your emotions you will have a high old time. This is classy, intelligent stuff.
It is superbly cast and played. Some performances don't amount to more than cameos, (Cedric Hardwicke and Alan Webb as Jo and Jake's fathers, Maggie Smith smilingly stealing Jo's husband right from under her nose and best of all, Yootha Joyce as the vindictive and unstable woman in the hairdressers). At the centre there is Bancroft and Finch as the couple struggling through their marriage and they are both marvelous. Finch, in particular, gives Jake an air of likability that may be absent from the script and Bancroft gets Jo's vulnerability spot on. As the husband of Jake's most recent conquest, James Mason is magnificently venomous and his scenes with Bancroft at the zoo and his final scene with Finch, ('You made me wet'), are master-classes in the art of acting.
The movie came out in 1964 and quickly disappeared. Watching it recently with a friend he described it as 'a miserable film' and while I think it a superb film, a near-masterpiece, I know exactly what he means. It is a film distinctly lacking in 'nice' characters and it generates very little warmth. Audiences who, back in the sixties might have admired the film, were unlikely to feel anything towards it and consequently it is seldom revived. A pity because, cold as it is, it is also one of the finest films of its decade.
