Showing:
BBC TWO, Wednesday August 8, 11.50pm
Synopsis:
(1964) The story of a marriage of two sensitive, articulate people, bound together by the strongest physical and emotional ties yet helpless in their inability to communicate.
Read the full synopsis on BFI Screenonline.
Cast:
- Anne Bancroft (Jo)
- Peter Finch (Jake)
- James Mason (Bob Conway)
- Janine Gray (Beth Conway)
- Maggie Smith (Philpot)
Full cast and credits on BFI Screenonline.
Analysis:
The Pumpkin Eater takes its title from the nursery rhyme: "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." As this allusion suggests, one of the central concerns of the film is female entrapment - the experience of being kept 'in a shell'.
The heroine, Jo, has all the ostensible trappings of a happy life: a handsome, successful husband, a beautiful house, an enviably affluent lifestyle, and battalions of healthy children. Yet she still comes to the conclusion that her life is "an empty place". She even suffers an emotional breakdown in the most unlikely of places - the luxurious Kensington department store, Harrods.
One could read the film as a proto-feminist protest against women's second-class status and limited opportunities, no matter which class they belong to.
Read the full analysis on BFI Screenonline.
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