The Pumpkin Eater

PINTER POSTFARTUM

Jack Clayton’s 1964 The Pumpkin Eater, based on Penelope Mortimer’s confessional novel, is infused with heavy-duty British neuroticism, what with Anne Bancroft morosely encased in adapter Harold Pinter’s inchoateness on women’s issues, with Oswald Morris’s cloudy-gray photography and his enjoyably distracting penchant for closeups, and with Maggie Smith, Cedric Hardwicke, James Mason and Yootha Joyce needling her at every opportunity. Though Clayton allows Bancroft too many contemplative gazes through windows and a showy breakdown at Harrods, during which we’re left to guess what’s ailing her, both he and Pinter are smugly vague about what’s really the matter. We’re told she can’t help getting preggers at the start of every marriage (three) and loves her children, yet, except for washing her daughters in the bathtub and taking five of her brood to the zoo, she’s rather stingy with affection, especially toward the two older boys who are sent off to boarding school and when returning for visits, they and Mom are apprehensive toward one another, responding almost as if they prefer to remain strangers. Her unexpressed bliss of conceiving as sexual pleasure turns into presumed postpartum depression, threatening the marriage to Peter Finch when another pregnancy arrives, with her own mother blessing the necessity she undergo “that sensible operation.” But there’s more to Bancroft’s character than after-birth emptiness, or abortion or the relief in sterilization; the novel is a frank collection of Mortimer’s own messy vicissitudes, including the sexual abuse she endured by her Anglican clergyman-father, her successive promiscuity, the six children she had—two from her first husband, two from extra-martial affairs, and two from her marriage to writer John Mortimer. What seems to have happened in the script is Pinter, who had his own adulterous involvements, dents only the outer cover of the character representing women (and their emotions) as hold-your-nose problems best left to the whiffs of indifferent doctors while allowing men to maintain duplicity at will. Implicit is what hadn’t been coined when Pinter was trying to figure out why his own ladies turned bitter and cold: Bancroft appears to be suffering from Pinter postfartum ennui. Another issue skirted is the lack of anything desirous or magnetic about her to attract men. Judith Crist, in the N.Y. Herald Tribune, hits the nail’s head: “She seems a cowlike creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis.” The real Mortimer was a successful writer of at least a dozen novels, replaced another Penelope (Gilliatt) as critic at London’s Observer, and Pinter’s adulterous mates career-minded and challenging, whereas Bancroft’s a baby-dropping party-pooper hostess. While awaiting the resolution, we also wonder why Finch as John Mortimer would want to get involved with her; as if she’s not already enough of a depressant, in various millinery she’s Anna Maria Alberghetti’s chilling future and with her hair down she looks so much like Susan Sontag she turns into an ice block, though an unusually pretty one when Oswald Morris’s camera zooms in on her. The movie’s most rousing moments come when she goes into a fury over Finch’s affairs, the angry row having been instigated by four-eyed Mason’s brazen scene-stealing crooked-teeth venting over a letter he discovered from his wife to Finch, reading it to Bancroft at the zoo. Confronting Finch, who rattles off the catalogue of half-lies and half-truths, she uses her voice as instrument of that anger, but when Mason delivers a second dose of nastiness over the phone about how he’ll destroy his wife and her husband, she starts swacking Finch repeatedly. She doesn’t get our sympathies; we want him to swack her back, less as a defensive act of a serial womanizer than for the visible fact she’s such a god damned droopy dullard. (In the real world the Mortimers would be divorced by 1971.) Bancroft’s framed gloomy posing as replacement for an informing performance was Oscar-nominated for 1964’s Best Actress (losing to Miss Poppins); she won the Cannes and Golden Globe awards; earned the BAFTA Best Foreign Actress honor and the movie received BAFTA awards for best screenplay, best b/w cinematography and costumes. Georges Delerue’s opening music is soft jazzy stuff and deceptively receptive; we need a lot more of it.

At Harold Pinter’s funeral, author Tom Stoppard is reported to have said, “You can cut the grief with a knife.” Other than those attending the farewell, I can’t quite believe anyone else not in attendance could feel a deep thickening of sorrow. Is there, has there ever been, a more alienating modern British playwright? One who didn’t move audiences by any emotions in his work but by the lack of them? Except anger: more than a few of us might have wanted to grab anything handy to shatter his recoiling deliberateness, both in life and his writing. For example, in the semi-autobiographical Betrayal, Pinter turned his own experiences into talking set pieces about deceit—his highly scandalous affairs with then-married British broadcaster-later-BFI governor Joan Bakewell (known as “the thinking man’s crumpet”) and with then-married biographer Lady Antonia Fraser while he was still married to actress Vivien Merchant. His aim is to intellectualize the gossip the London tabloids salivated over—using language as the supposed attraction: it’s speedy, attempting to be laconic, bordering on Attic, the way civilized people under stress and scrutiny are presumed to talk to each other. Coming from Ben Kingsley, Patricia Hodge and Jeremy Irons, the chatter is empty and brittle; we keep waiting for the staid, simple-minded repetition to crack. After the first few longish scenes, the dreariness is all set before us and there isn’t any need to want to know more about these emotive retards. Pinter’s device to entice is not to go forward to find out what’ll become of their lives once the inevitable breakups begin but to go backward, every year or two until—count 'em!—seven so we can see how the boring betrayal started. But he never reverses to the present for oxygen; we’re trapped in a suffocating funnel. Going against the critics pigging out on superlatives to describe the cast, I can’t remember this level of bad acting from British-trained actors in a single movie any time in the 80s; they ooze crumminess in scene after scene, mumbling, fumbling, being monotonous and clonishly mechanical (watch the two men drink). Kingsley’s miscast as the husband whose wife (Hodge) is sleeping with his best friend (Irons). He uses his lack of belonging as humor, and there’s unintended gratefulness for it: if this man has this kind of permanent tan, wouldn’t it rub off on his kids, just a bit? Doesn’t; they’re positively British—pudgy, with sickly white skin covered with red blotches. There’s an incriminating excuse for sticking with flashbacks and not returning to real time: Pinter eventually married Fraser and pitiable Merchant died from chronic alcoholism and disconsolateness a short time afterwards. Directed by David Hugh Jones, Betrayal isn’t but could pass as a belated chapter of the American Film Theatre series, the British-loaded experiment producing A Delicate Balance, Butley (directed by Pinter), The Homecoming (another Pinter wonder), The Maids, Luther, Galileo, The Three Sisters, etc. With the scaled look of theatre and just enough camera movement to pretend it isn’t, Betrayal is retrogressive with the sourest of twists—it’s not even good theatre. Yet quintessentially Pinter: we’re never sure why we’ve journeyed into the “What is real?/There are no answers” snittiness of a hardcore reactionary leftist bastard.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com

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