Jack Clayton (1964)

‘Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.’

I guess this is the source of the title of Penelope Mortimer’s novel, which Harold Pinter adapted for the screen.  If you google ‘Peter, Peter’, it regularly comes up on lists of nursery rhymes with darker hidden meanings:  there are suggestions that it may be about uxoricide or that a ‘pumpkin shell’ was code for a chastity belt.   The protagonist of The Pumpkin Eater, Jo Armitage, is the mother of six children from three marriages.  Her psychiatrist suggests to her that Jo can justify having sex only with procreation in mind.  Her marital misery plumbs new depths after her adulterous third husband – Jake, a screenwriter – has persuaded Jo to have an abortion and be sterilised.  She’s then told by an acquaintance called Bob Conway that his wife is carrying Jake’s child after an affair on a film shoot in Morocco.

The family’s London house and the now disused windmill where they once lived are realised brilliantly by Clayton and his cinematographer Oswald Morris.  We experience the house as if through Jo’s eyes – so that the details of its décor and the textures of the life going on within it seem both barely noticed, because they’re so familiar, and horribly separate, alien.  There are images intersected by door or window frames that convey, strongly but not over-emphatically, a sense of Jo being closed off or closed in.  This sounds consciously artful and so it is – but the visual scheme always connects with the mind of the main character.  Although there are many shots that suggest a bleached out world, Morris’s black-and-white photography is emotionally varied; so is Georges Delerue’s supple, melancholy score.  Jack Clayton’s previous film was The Innocents and there are moments in The Pumpkin Eater when Jo’s brood are not much less disquieting than the brother and sister in the earlier movie.  Because it takes some time to get clear just how many children there are, they’re powerful on an almost supernatural level, yet they emerge as individuals too.  When they’re playing together, the bursts of noise can be violently disorienting.  Wide, long shots of the children emerging one by one from the distance and coming towards Jo are eerily beautiful.

Anne Bancroft’s face is often mask-like in its shifts between sadness and inscrutability.  Occasionally her head is framed so that it seems a cutout, the dominant part of an image but detached from it and from the rest of her body.   With the help of Motley’s clothes (and hats) and the skilful make-up (George Frost) and hairdressing (Gordon Bond), Bancroft’s angular beauty reinforces the presentation of Jo as a series of facets struggling to cohere as a single identity.   Bancroft is the brittle soul of The Pumpkin Eater and the connection between her and Peter Finch is electric when Jo and Jake first meet (they’re introduced by Jo’s then husband – the second one).   Having not seen him for some time, I’d forgotten how much Finch was able to draw the camera, his ability to express conflicted emotions with remarkable naturalness.  Jake is an impressive character because his charm and (he obviously believes) his decent aspects are not, in Finch’s performance, at all compromised by the increasing evidence of his sexual faithlessness.   As Conway, James Mason’s vocal edge and versatility are thrilling; his grin at first suggests lethal insincerity, then desperation.  Conway invites Jo to afternoon tea at London Zoo and they talk together as Jo’s children, with a nanny supervising ineffectually, enjoy themselves.  Conway reels off the choices on the menu.  A few minutes later, he’s reading from a love letter his wife sent to Jake.  In these passages especially, Mason shows himself a superb interpreter of Harold Pinter’s words.  Pinter provides some coruscatingly nasty lines.  The dialogue is not always so impressive when it’s used for a relatively conventional exchange.

There’s a lot to admire then in The Pumpkin Eater; its weakness is that, at this distance in time anyway, its subject is just not that interesting.  Within a few years, other movies, as well as sustained public debate, would have addressed issues of female and feminine identity and the tensions between sexual partnership and motherhood.  These themes may have been unusual when Penelope Mortimer’s novel was published in 1962 but it’s hard, coming to the material for the first time now, to find it original.   Even so, it was good to see The Pumpkin Eater – I can’t remember noticing it in television listings for many years.  The strong supporting cast includes Richard Johnson as Jo’s second husband, Cedric Hardwicke as her father and Alan Webb as Jake’s, Eric Porter as the psychiatrist and Cyril Luckham as a doctor.  The young Maggie Smith’s intense eccentricity as an unwelcome (from Jo’s point of view) house guest is compelling.  Yootha Joyce is riveting as a spectacularly unhappy woman who starts a conversation with Jo at the hairdresser’s.   The children include Phoebe Nicholls, Frances White and Kate Nicholls (the last two as the same daughter at two different ages).

20 August 2010