The Pumpkin Eater – 1964 | 118 mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Powerful drama influenced by the European cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni adapted from Penelope Mortimer’s novel by Harold Pinter. Pinter’s screenplay is a complex and painful portrait of human foibles encompassing the joys and tragedies of life, birth and death, marriage and divorce, love and hate. Anne Bancroft received a deserved Oscar nomination for her performance as the introspective wife. Peter Finch delivers an equally blockbuster performances and the supporting cast is equally impressive from James Mason’s boorish party guest and Maggie Smith as one of Finch’s lovers.

Set in the middle-class Hampstead, following her divorce from Giles (Richard Johnson), twice-married compulsive child-bearing mother of six, Jo (Anne Bancroft), realizes her philandering third husband, highly successful screenwriter Jake Armitage (Peter Finch), will never settle down to a life of marital fidelity. When Jo discovers that she is pregnant again, she is wracked with indecision about her future. She gives birth to her seventh child and suffers a nervous breakdown in Harrods after learning that her husband has been unfaithful once again. This, along with an encounter with an unbalanced woman at the hairdresser’s, propels Jo to undergo psychoanalysis from a psychiatrist Mr. Ingram (Eric Porter). Jo subsequently discovers that she is once more expecting a baby, but agrees to Jake’s arguments for a hysterectomy.

Soon after she agrees to meet pompous Bob Conway (James Mason) at the zoo, and he reveals that Jake is having an affair with his wife Beth (Janine Gray); and that before her there was Philpott (Maggie Smith) and half a dozen others. In an ugly scene Jo confronts her husband and returns to Giles. Demoralized once more by her husband’s frostiness at his father’s funeral, Jo returns to their windmill in the country house and spends the night alone. In the morning she wakes to the sound of her children as Jake leads them up a hill. Jo resigns herself to life, for good or ill, with her husband.