The Pumpkin Eater - Reception

Reception

According to the BFI's Monthly Film Bulletin, "there is something phantasmally absurd about this well-meaning, ambitious film....It could well be that Pinter's brilliance is altogether the wrong kind of brilliance to let loose on the scripting of this already nerve-raw, nightmarish subject. Jo...makes an eminently worthwhile, but virtually intractable, subject for a film: worthwhile because neurotics rarely get a square, sympathetic, penetrating deal in the cinema; intractable because, like many neurotics, she is a fixated and evidently crashing bore, and one of the most difficult things to do is to present a bore fairly without at the same time boring your audience too. Part of their tragedy is that bores, willy-nilly, seem often ridiculous. So the last thing a seriously-intentioned writer can afford to do is heap further grotesqueries upon them. But this is what has happened in Pinter's often genuinely amusing script. For every justified extravagance — in the characteristically ghastly party scene, for instance, or Maggie Smith's gushing fatuities as Philpott — there are a dozen which are not. The poor, crazy lady in the hair-dresser's is a schematic and surely rather portentous case in point; so is the Zoo, and Harrods, Jo's gloomy hats, and that windmill love nest, and the tiresome ambiguity of that psychiatrist off to Tenerife (is he perceptive, or unsympathetic, a good doctor or just a fashionable one?). Doubtless some kind of pseudo-Antonioni, pseudo-Fellini comment is being made on our society, but if this is indeed so then the glee and the ambivalence are significantly more telling, and certainly more apparent, than any clarity of focus."

According to Time magazine, "The Pumpkin Eater of the nursery rhyme put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well. Giving a wry contemporary twist to Mother Goose, Penelope Mortimer's vivid first-person novel suggests that the poor creature then swiftly developed shell shock. In this slow, strong, incisive film version of the book, the ironing out of a well-kept wife's unkempt psyche is portrayed with harrowing perception by Anne Bancroft." Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune said Bancroft "seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis." Variety wrote " script vividly brings to life the principal characters in this story of a shattered marriage, though Pinter's resort to flashback technique is confusing in the early stages. Jack Clayton's direction gets off to a slow, almost casual start, but the pace quickens as the drama becomes more intense."

The film continues to provoke comments decades later. In a 1999 obituary for Penelope Mortimer, The Guardian characterized Harold Pinter as someone who values what is "written between the lines", making him "her ideal translator and interpreter" for the film adaptation of Mortimer's novel. In 2006, David Hare wrote that "Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime: to Meryl Streep, obviously, in The French Lieutenant's Woman; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most overlooked of all British films, The Pumpkin Eater; and, unforgettably, to Dirk Bogarde, both in Accident and The Servant.