Anne Bancroft stars as a British housewife, suffering from depression, seemingly addicted to having children, and betrayed by her philandering husband (Peter Finch). The script is by Harold Pinter, adapted from a novel which, via a first-person narrative, takes the woman's point of view, and the dialogue is nicely 'Pinteresque' – people repeating lines back at each other, awkward pauses, unanswered questions, veiled insults, etc. The performances are all good, and there are visually arresting edits, deep focus shots, and extreme close ups of faces. The vaguely jazzy music is wistful and stately, coming as it does from George Delerue, who scored the roughly contemporary 'Jules et Jim' (which, in its combination of slow pacing, emotional dramatics and smooth black and white surface, perhaps shares some similarities with this picture.) But the film as a whole ends up seeing like an ultimately rather insubstantial British upper-middle class version of Antonioni's 'L'Avventura', full of unpleasant or just selfishly uninteresting characters wearing nice clothes in fashionable London houses and country retreats. Hence the review in Time Out magazine that sees the scene of Bancroft's breakdown in Harrods as a kind of parodic summation of the movie: the chic-swathed angst of the wealthy. The slightly soapy plot is treated for the most part as serious drama, but does have its satirical aspect (probably due to Pinter's script), though this never really makes itself fully apparent. I guess 'The Pumpkin Eater' needs to be placed in the context of the British New Wave – dramas about 'real people', frankly discussing controversial topics such as abortion and infidelity, as opposed to films with generic, historical or fantastical subjects. And it does, though not that explicitly, deal with certain feminist issues in a way that was probably quite unusual at the time.The main problem is that the privileged lifestyles of the characters makes it all feel like an in-depth, expertly crafted examination of the selfishly introspective psychological diversions of the nouveau riche (nothing much is made of the one intrusion from outside this social world, the strange moment when Bancroft is visited by a ragged door-to-door 'prophet', who seems to preach a 'gospel' of sexual liberation); and one ultimately wonders whether the subject deserves such close attention.
