The Pumpkin Eater ***** (1964, Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, James Mason) – Classic Movie Review 2105

Jack Clayton’s 1964 film The Pumpkin Eater is British Sixties film-making perfection. It provides a superb showcase for Anne Bancroft, who won the Best Actress award at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTA for Best Foreign Actress.

Director Jack Clayton’s mesmerisingly engrossing 1964 film The Pumpkin Eater is one of the choice director’s finest, most exquisite films. It is British Sixties film-making perfection from a special, iconic era for UK movies. It provides a superb showcase for the great acting of Anne Bancroft, who gets into the voice and under the skin of the well-to-do Englishwoman Jo Armitage.

Bancroft won the Best Actress award 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, bizarrely losing to Julie Andrews who won for Mary Poppins. Harold Pinter won the 1964 BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.

Jo has left her second husband Giles (Richard Johnson) and lives in London with Giles’s friend, movie screenwriter Jake Armitage (Peter Finch, and six of Jo’s eight children. But Jo suspects third husband Jake of chronic infidelity, she is a fragile mental state, seeing a psychiatrist and has a breakdown after her eighth child is born.

James Mason co-stars as bitter husband Bob Conway, an acquaintance of Jo’s, who alleges an affair between his wife and Jake during production of a film in Morocco. Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Bancroft’s father Mr James, Maggie Smith (as Philpot) and Eric Porter (as Jo’s psychiatrist) also star in this riveting, beautifully performed and meticulously crafted drama.

When you think of Finch’s usual sympathetic, often noble character, in Sunday, Bloody Sunday for example, it’s a shock to see how well he can perform the role of deceiver Jake, the philandering husband. [Spoiler alert] Jake finally admits some of his infidelities under heated interrogation by Jo, who furiously assaults him and retaliates by having an affair with her second husband. 

Harold Pinter’s intense, vivid, finely honed screenplay does perfect justice to Penelope Mortimer’s 1962 novel and probes deeply into the emotional truth of both the story and its characters.  In 2006, playwright David Hare wrote ‘Pinter regularly offers actors the opportunities of a lifetime… to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater.’

Also in the cast are Janine Gray, Rosalind Atkinson, Alan Webb, Cyril Luckham, Anthony Nicholls, John Junkin, Yootha Joyce, John Franklyn-Robbins and Gerald Sim.

The title refers to the nursery rhyme Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.

Oswald Morris’s black and white cinematography is just plain masterly. Oswald Morris died on March 17 2014, aged 98. He won a Best Cinematography Oscar for Fiddler on the Roof (1971). He won three Bafta BAFTA Film Awards, all for black and white movies, all in successive years – The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Hill (1965) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) – a dazzling hat trick.

British actor Richard Johnson, who appeared in such films as Deadlier than the Male, Khartoum and The Haunting (1963) but turned down an offer to play James Bond in Dr No, died on 6 June 2015, aged 87.  Johnson, who was married to actress Kim Novak in the 1960s, died after a short illness at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, London.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2105

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