The Pumpkin Eater (1964)

(On Cable TV, April 2021) Terrible people generally make for more interesting movies than good dull people, but it’s a fine line in dosing the awfulness of characters and keeping audience sympathy. It’s especially challenging in films that don’t have much else going for them — neorealist black comedies like The Pumpkin Eater featuring a woman with a high-but-unspecified number of kids from three marriages wedded (for the third time) to a man juggling multiple affairs. The pacing is slow, the structure bounces back and forth in time, the epiphanies are small and the characters are more irritating than anything else. Fortunately, there are occasional moments to draw us back in. Cinephiles will have fun seeing James Mason in glasses and a moustache playing an utterly despicable character. Or seeing a young Maggie Smith play the homewrecker (even if the home was self-destructing anyway). Or the fight that triggers the third act. And then there’s Anne Bancroft, who got some critical attention at the film’s release for playing a terrible person, a woman with substantial mental health issues who has kids as a form of self-therapy and otherwise wanders aimlessly through the film. Oh, I’m aware that The Pumpkin Eater can be read on a few levels as a story of a woman forced into a role she did not want — but that hardly excuses the dull, bloodless way the film deals with its material and the almost innate revulsion these characters cause. They are terrible people—maybe not entirely through fault of their own, but they are terrible people. The film will probably be more interesting to those who like to witness self-contained character drama, abstracting notions of “likable” characters. For everyone else, though, The Pumpkin Eater may be a mixed bag.