The Pumpkin Eater DVD

Julian Upton is hugely impressed by this study of a couple in crisis directed by Jack Clayton, adapted by Harold Pinter and starring Anne Bancroft.

Watching The Pumpkin Eater, you wonder if the silver screen was ever graced with another face as beautiful — and as beautifully pained — as Anne Bancroft’s. The whole story of a dissolving marriage is played out on her porcelain skin; her regal, glacial features reflect every indignity a philandering husband can inflict on a wife.

This is a close-up study of affluent agony in well-to-do Hampstead. Bancroft is remarkable as the strongly maternal but emotionally fragile Jo, onto her third husband and her fifth child but still plagued by overwhelming loneliness and a longing to be loved completely. Husband Jake (Peter Finch) is a screenwriter; he’s dashing and charismatic but also stern and distant in that enigmatic, masculine way. He’s loving when he wants to be, but he’s having affairs and Jo can’t deal with it; her answer is to have yet another baby. Their resulting arguments escalate into violence; later, Jo has a nervous breakdown in the middle of Harrod’s food hall.

This may sound like just a superior slice of soap, but it’s much more than that. It’s adapted from a Penelope Mortimer novel by Harold Pinter, and the dialogue has his stamp all over it. The Servant notwithstanding, it’s probably his most successful stab at screenwriting: this is as much Pinter as there has been on the screen outside the straight adaptations of his own plays. The characters don’t converse, they mark out their territory; they intimidate, seduce and manipulate. Only Jo seems to have love in her heart, and she is largely silent. But does she need too much love? Her fragility borders on the self-absorbed, the chronically self-pitying; Pinter doesn’t shy away from that interpretation.

But it is Jack Clayton, that unsung hero of sixties film-making, who is key to The Pumpkin Eater’s power and grace; his direction is arty but unself-conscious. He understands actors and he understands the camera. It’s a shame he didn’t collaborate with Pinter more often — he has as much, if not more, assurance than Joseph Losey.

This is one of British cinema’s few truly grown-up films.

Julian Upton on 30th September 2009
Author of 150 reviews