The Pumpkin Eater (1964) - film review

As middle-age steals over her, Jo Armitage finds herself trapped in a stale marriage and, in a state of profound melancholia, she looks back on her life.  She remembers her early life with her present husband, Jake, an aspiring young screenwriter.  They were so very much in love and Jake wasn’t remotely put off by the fact that Jo had five children from her two previous marriages.   But as the years pass, the couple drift apart, Jake’s success in his work merely accentuating the rift between them.  Realising that her husband has started to have extra-marital affairs, Jo sinks into depression and begins to lose interest in life...

Combining kitchen sink realism with the dream-like expressionism that was visible in much European art house cinema at the time, The Pumpkin Eater is a profoundly unsettling examination of a crumbling marriage within the starched confines of bourgeois respectability.  Harold Pinter’s superlative (and often chilling) dialogue (adapted from a novel by Penelope Mortimer), together with Oswald Morris’s distinctive cinematography, brings a fresh, somewhat surreal dimension to a familiar tale of infidelity and marital breakdown, the stylistic touches emphasising the psychological anxiety of the heroine as her life dissolves into an existential void.

Jack Clayton directed many notable films, including the social realist classic Room at the Top (1959) and the truly terrifying thriller The Innocents (1961), before his descent into Hollywood mediocrity with The Great Gatsby (1974).  He made The Pumpkin Eater during his inspired auteur middle period, presumably after having been influenced by his European contemporaries.  The film’s style and subject matter clearly owe something to Michelangelo Antonioni (see for example La Notte, 1961), although the impression of the French New Wave can also be felt, not only from Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), but also Louis Malle’s Le Feu follet and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, both released in 1963.

Anne Bancroft won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1964 for her stellar work on this film, but hers is just one of a bevy of exceptional performances from a remarkable cast.  Peter Finch and James Mason are as compelling as Bancroft, each giving the most cynical and twisted portrayal of middle-class masculinity imaginable (which is exactly how Bancroft’s character would see them, through the prism of psychological collapse created by her husband’s infidelity).   Cedric Hardwicke is excellent in his last film role (he died not long after the film was released in 1964) and there is a remarkable, almost visceral turn from Yootha Joyce, who deserves to be far better remembered for roles such as this instead of the tacky sitcoms she appeared in during the 1970s.  These characteristically Pinter-esque performances help to make The Pumpkin Eater one of the most innovative and disturbing British films of the 1960s.

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