The Pumpkin Eater
Encyclopedia
The Pumpkin Eater is a 1964 British drama film
starring Anne Bancroft
as an unusually fertile woman and Peter Finch
as her philandering husband.
The film was adapted by Harold Pinter
from the 1962 novel of the same name by Penelope Mortimer
, and was directed by Jack Clayton
.
), a woman with six children from three marriages, who becomes negative and withdrawn after discovering that her third (and current) husband, Jake (Finch
), has been unfaithful to her. After a series of loosely related events in which Jake's infidelity is balanced by his reliability as a breadwinner and a father, Jo and Jake take a first tentative step toward reconciliation.
Most of the story is based on two issues: Jo's predilection for childbearing and Jake's extramarital affairs. The question of Jo's fertility is first broached by her psychiatrist. He suggests that she may feel uncomfortable with the messiness or vulgarity of sex, and that she may be using childbirth to justify it to herself. This does not prevent her from becoming pregnant again, but she follows suggestions by Jake and her doctor that she have an abortion and be sterilised, and she seems happy after the operation.
Meanwhile, signs accumulate that Jake has been having affairs while pursuing a successful career as a screenwriter. The first indication is about a woman who lived with the Armitage family for a while. Jake reacts irrationally and unconvincingly to Jo's questioning after the children tell her the woman fainted into Jake's arms. The second sign comes from Bob Conway (Mason
), an acquaintance who alleges an affair between his wife and Jake during production of a film in Morocco. Finally, Jake admits some of his infidelities under heated interrogation by Jo. After venting her frustration by furiously assaulting him, she retaliates by having an affair with her second husband. This elicits a similar coldness from Jake.
In the film's finale, Jo spends a night alone in the unused windmill that the family once lived in. The following morning, Jake and their children arrive at the windmill with food. Seeing how happy her children are with Jake, Jo indicates her acceptance of him by sadly but graciously accepting a can of beer from him, a gesture which echoes another scene in the windmill from a happier time in their marriage.
, "there is something phantasmally absurd about this well-meaning, ambitious film....It could well be that Pinter's brilliance is altogether the wrong kind of brilliance to let loose on the scripting of this already nerve-raw, nightmarish subject. Jo...makes an eminently worthwhile, but virtually intractable, subject for a film: worthwhile because neurotics rarely get a square, sympathetic, penetrating deal in the cinema; intractable because, like many neurotics, she is a fixated and evidently crashing bore, and one of the most difficult things to do is to present a bore fairly without at the same time boring your audience too. Part of their tragedy is that bores, willy-nilly, seem often ridiculous. So the last thing a seriously-intentioned writer can afford to do is heap further grotesqueries upon them. But this is what has happened in Pinter's often genuinely amusing script. For every justified extravagance — in the characteristically ghastly party scene, for instance, or Maggie Smith's gushing fatuities as Philpott — there are a dozen which are not. The poor, crazy lady in the hair-dresser's is a schematic and surely rather portentous case in point; so is the Zoo, and Harrods
, Jo's gloomy hats, and that windmill love nest, and the tiresome ambiguity of that psychiatrist off to Tenerife
(is he perceptive, or unsympathetic, a good doctor or just a fashionable one?). Doubtless some kind of pseudo-Antonioni
, pseudo-Fellini
comment is being made on our society, but if this is indeed so then the glee and the ambivalence are significantly more telling, and certainly more apparent, than any clarity of focus."
According to Time magazine, "The Pumpkin Eater of the nursery rhyme
put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well. Giving a wry contemporary twist to Mother Goose, Penelope Mortimer's vivid first-person novel suggests that the poor creature then swiftly developed shell shock. In this slow, strong, incisive film version of the book, the ironing out of a well-kept wife's unkempt psyche is portrayed with harrowing perception by Anne Bancroft." Judith Crist
of the New York Herald Tribune
said Bancroft "seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis
." Variety wrote "[Pinter's] script vividly brings to life the principal characters in this story of a shattered marriage, though Pinter's resort to flashback technique
is confusing in the early stages. Jack Clayton's direction gets off to a slow, almost casual start, but the pace quickens as the drama becomes more intense."
The film continues to provoke comments decades later. In a 1999 obituary for Penelope Mortimer
, The Guardian characterized Harold Pinter as someone who values what is "written between the lines", making him "her ideal translator and interpreter" for the film adaptation of Mortimer's novel. In 2006, David Hare
wrote that "Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime: to Meryl Streep
, obviously, in The French Lieutenant's Woman
; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde
, both in Accident and The Servant.
won the award for Best Actress
at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival
and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress. She was also nominated for the Best Actress
at the 37th Academy Awards
, losing that award to Julie Andrews
(who won for her role in Mary Poppins
). Harold Pinter won the 1964 BAFTA Award
for Best British Screenplay.
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
starring Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft was an American actress associated with the Method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg....
as an unusually fertile woman and Peter Finch
Peter Finch
Peter Finch was a British-born Australian actor. He is best remembered for his role as "crazed" television anchorman Howard Beale in the film Network, which earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor, his fifth Best Actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a...
as her philandering husband.
The film was adapted by Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
from the 1962 novel of the same name by Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Ruth Mortimer , was a British journalist, biographer and novelist.-Early life:...
, and was directed by Jack Clayton
Jack Clayton
Jack Clayton was a British film director who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.-Career:A native of East Sussex, Clayton started his career as a child actor on the 1929 film Dark Red Roses...
.
Plot
The story revolves around Jo Armitage (BancroftAnne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft was an American actress associated with the Method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg....
), a woman with six children from three marriages, who becomes negative and withdrawn after discovering that her third (and current) husband, Jake (Finch
Peter Finch
Peter Finch was a British-born Australian actor. He is best remembered for his role as "crazed" television anchorman Howard Beale in the film Network, which earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor, his fifth Best Actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a...
), has been unfaithful to her. After a series of loosely related events in which Jake's infidelity is balanced by his reliability as a breadwinner and a father, Jo and Jake take a first tentative step toward reconciliation.
Most of the story is based on two issues: Jo's predilection for childbearing and Jake's extramarital affairs. The question of Jo's fertility is first broached by her psychiatrist. He suggests that she may feel uncomfortable with the messiness or vulgarity of sex, and that she may be using childbirth to justify it to herself. This does not prevent her from becoming pregnant again, but she follows suggestions by Jake and her doctor that she have an abortion and be sterilised, and she seems happy after the operation.
Meanwhile, signs accumulate that Jake has been having affairs while pursuing a successful career as a screenwriter. The first indication is about a woman who lived with the Armitage family for a while. Jake reacts irrationally and unconvincingly to Jo's questioning after the children tell her the woman fainted into Jake's arms. The second sign comes from Bob Conway (Mason
James Mason
James Neville Mason was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes .- Early life :Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the...
), an acquaintance who alleges an affair between his wife and Jake during production of a film in Morocco. Finally, Jake admits some of his infidelities under heated interrogation by Jo. After venting her frustration by furiously assaulting him, she retaliates by having an affair with her second husband. This elicits a similar coldness from Jake.
In the film's finale, Jo spends a night alone in the unused windmill that the family once lived in. The following morning, Jake and their children arrive at the windmill with food. Seeing how happy her children are with Jake, Jo indicates her acceptance of him by sadly but graciously accepting a can of beer from him, a gesture which echoes another scene in the windmill from a happier time in their marriage.
Cast
- Anne BancroftAnne BancroftAnne Bancroft was an American actress associated with the Method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg....
- Jo Armitage - Peter FinchPeter FinchPeter Finch was a British-born Australian actor. He is best remembered for his role as "crazed" television anchorman Howard Beale in the film Network, which earned him a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor, his fifth Best Actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a...
- Jake Armitage - James MasonJames MasonJames Neville Mason was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes .- Early life :Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the...
- Bob Conway - Janine GrayJanine GrayJanine Gray is an Indian-born actress of British descent. She guest-starred in numerous 1960s television programmes.She was born in Bombay where her father was stationed as an oil engineer, but returned to England with her family when she was five years old. She married Herman Goffberg, a former...
- Beth Conway - Cedric HardwickeCedric HardwickeSir Cedric Webster Hardwicke was a noted English stage and film actor whose career spanned nearly fifty years...
- Mr. James - Jo's father - Rosalind Atkinson - Mrs. James - Jo's mother
- Alan WebbAlan Webb (actor)-Biography and Career:Educated at Bramcote School, Scarborough, and RN Colleges Osborne and Dartmouth. He served in the Royal Navy.Webb's early days were spent performing with the Lena Ashwell Players , J. B. Fagan's Oxford Players , The Croydon Repertory Company , and the Old Vic-Sadler's Wells...
- Mr. Armitage - Jake's father - Richard JohnsonRichard Johnson (actor)Richard Johnson is an English actor, writer and producer, who starred in several British films of the 1960s and has also had a distinguished stage career. He most recently appeared in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.-Life and career:...
- Giles - Maggie SmithMaggie SmithDame Margaret Natalie Smith, DBE , better known as Maggie Smith, is an English film, stage, and television actress who made her stage debut in 1952 and is still performing after 59 years...
- Philpott - Eric PorterEric PorterEric Richard Porter was an English actor of stage, film and television.-Early life:Porter was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, to Richard John Porter and Phoebe Elizabeth Spall...
- Psychiatrist - Cyril LuckhamCyril LuckhamCyril Luckham was a British film, television and theatre actor.Luckham played the White Guardian in the long running science fiction television series Doctor Who. He appeared in The Ribos Operation, the first serial in The Key to Time season, and Enlightenment...
- Doctor - Anthony NichollsAnthony Nicholls (actor)Anthony Nicholls was an English film, television, and stage actor.-Life and career:Nicholls was born Sydney Horace Nicholls on 16 October 1902 in Windsor, Berkshire, England, the son of Florence and photojournalist Horace Nicholls. He served in the Royal Artillery...
- Surgeon - John Franklyn-RobbinsJohn Franklyn-RobbinsJohn Franklyn-Robbins was a British actor. He appeared in the film The Golden Compass. Appearing in television series and feature films, his credits included:*I, Claudius *The Merchant of Venice...
- Parson - John JunkinJohn JunkinJohn Francis Junkin was an English radio, television and film performer and scriptwriter.In 1960 Junkin joined Joan Littlewood's Stratford East Theatre Workshop, and played the lead in the original production of Sparrows Can't Sing...
- Undertaker - Yootha JoyceYootha JoyceYootha Joyce was an English actress, best known for playing Mildred Roper in Man About the House and George and Mildred.-Early life:...
- Woman at hairdresser's
Reception
According to the BFI's Monthly Film BulletinMonthly Film Bulletin
The Monthly Film Bulletin was a periodical of the British Film Institute published monthly from February 1934 to April 1991. It reviewed all films on release in the United Kingdom, including those with a narrow arthouse release. The MFB was edited in the mid-1950s by David Robinson, in the late...
, "there is something phantasmally absurd about this well-meaning, ambitious film....It could well be that Pinter's brilliance is altogether the wrong kind of brilliance to let loose on the scripting of this already nerve-raw, nightmarish subject. Jo...makes an eminently worthwhile, but virtually intractable, subject for a film: worthwhile because neurotics rarely get a square, sympathetic, penetrating deal in the cinema; intractable because, like many neurotics, she is a fixated and evidently crashing bore, and one of the most difficult things to do is to present a bore fairly without at the same time boring your audience too. Part of their tragedy is that bores, willy-nilly, seem often ridiculous. So the last thing a seriously-intentioned writer can afford to do is heap further grotesqueries upon them. But this is what has happened in Pinter's often genuinely amusing script. For every justified extravagance — in the characteristically ghastly party scene, for instance, or Maggie Smith's gushing fatuities as Philpott — there are a dozen which are not. The poor, crazy lady in the hair-dresser's is a schematic and surely rather portentous case in point; so is the Zoo, and Harrods
Harrods
Harrods is an upmarket department store located in Brompton Road in Brompton, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London. The Harrods brand also applies to other enterprises undertaken by the Harrods group of companies including Harrods Bank, Harrods Estates, Harrods Aviation and Air...
, Jo's gloomy hats, and that windmill love nest, and the tiresome ambiguity of that psychiatrist off to Tenerife
Tenerife
Tenerife is the largest and most populous island of the seven Canary Islands, it is also the most populated island of Spain, with a land area of 2,034.38 km² and 906,854 inhabitants, 43% of the total population of the Canary Islands. About five million tourists visit Tenerife each year, the...
(is he perceptive, or unsympathetic, a good doctor or just a fashionable one?). Doubtless some kind of pseudo-Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian modernist film director, screenwriter, editor and short story writer.- Personal life :...
, pseudo-Fellini
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
comment is being made on our society, but if this is indeed so then the glee and the ambivalence are significantly more telling, and certainly more apparent, than any clarity of focus."
According to Time magazine, "The Pumpkin Eater of the nursery rhyme
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
"Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 13497.-Lyrics:Common modern versions include:...
put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well. Giving a wry contemporary twist to Mother Goose, Penelope Mortimer's vivid first-person novel suggests that the poor creature then swiftly developed shell shock. In this slow, strong, incisive film version of the book, the ironing out of a well-kept wife's unkempt psyche is portrayed with harrowing perception by Anne Bancroft." Judith Crist
Judith Crist
Judith Crist is an American film critic. She appeared regularly on the Today show from 1964-1973 and has appeared in one film, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories...
of the New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
said Bancroft "seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis
Pelvis
In human anatomy, the pelvis is the lower part of the trunk, between the abdomen and the lower limbs .The pelvis includes several structures:...
." Variety wrote "[Pinter's] script vividly brings to life the principal characters in this story of a shattered marriage, though Pinter's resort to flashback technique
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
is confusing in the early stages. Jack Clayton's direction gets off to a slow, almost casual start, but the pace quickens as the drama becomes more intense."
The film continues to provoke comments decades later. In a 1999 obituary for Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Ruth Mortimer , was a British journalist, biographer and novelist.-Early life:...
, The Guardian characterized Harold Pinter as someone who values what is "written between the lines", making him "her ideal translator and interpreter" for the film adaptation of Mortimer's novel. In 2006, David Hare
David Hare (playwright)
Sir David Hare is an English playwright and theatre and film director.-Early life:Hare was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, East Sussex, the son of Agnes and Clifford Hare, a sailor. He was educated at Lancing, an independent school in West Sussex, and at Jesus College, Cambridge...
wrote that "Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime: to Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...
, obviously, in The French Lieutenant's Woman
The French Lieutenant's Woman (film)
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1981 film directed by Karel Reisz and adapted by playwright Harold Pinter. It is based on the novel of the same title by John Fowles...
; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde
Dirk Bogarde
Sir Dirk Bogarde was an English actor and novelist. Initially a matinee idol in such films as Doctor in the House and other Rank Organisation pictures, Bogarde later acted in art-house films such as Death in Venice...
, both in Accident and The Servant.
Awards
Anne BancroftAnne Bancroft
Anne Bancroft was an American actress associated with the Method acting school, which she had studied under Lee Strasberg....
won the award for Best Actress
Best Actress Award (Cannes Film Festival)
The Best Actress Award is an award presented at the Cannes Film Festival. It is chosen by the jury from the 'official section' of films at the festival. It was first awarded in 1946.-Award Winners:-External links:* * ....
at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival
1964 Cannes Film Festival
The 17th Cannes Film Festival was held from 29 April to 14 May 1964. The Palme d’Or is renamed 'Grand Prix International du Festival', the name that will be used until 1975.-Jury:*Fritz Lang *Charles Boyer...
and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress. She was also nominated for the Best Actress
Academy Award for Best Actress
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...
at the 37th Academy Awards
37th Academy Awards
The 37th Academy Awards honored film achievements of 1964. For the first time, an award was presented in the field of makeup. All four acting awards went to non-American actors, something not repeated until the 80th Academy Awards were awarded for 2007....
, losing that award to Julie Andrews
Julie Andrews
Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honors...
(who won for her role in Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins (film)
Mary Poppins is a 1964 musical film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, produced by Walt Disney, and based on the Mary Poppins books series by P. L. Travers with illustrations by Mary Shepard. The film was directed by Robert Stevenson and written by Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi, with songs by...
). Harold Pinter won the 1964 BAFTA Award
18th British Academy Film Awards
1965----Best Film: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb The 18th British Film Awards, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1965, honoured the best films of 1964.-Best Film: Dr...
for Best British Screenplay.