Look, I haven’t been around much this week because I’ve been busy, but also I’ve not had that much to say. So why not do a movie recommendation? It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of those. And why not have it be something totally obscure that I recently watched and have wanted to write about for a while now? Since nobody can stop me, here I go:

The Pumpkin Eater is a British movie from 1964 that stars Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch, the latter of whom is known for?Network and not much else. That he’s not known for this movie is only because nobody knows this movie, but what he does here is to me much more impressive than his work in?Network. Not to get too far into that movie but Howard Beale pretty much ceases to be an interesting character after the “mad as hell” speech, but his character work here is deep, compelling, and frequently repugnant in the most amazing ways, though Bancroft’s work is every bit as good.?Technically, The Pumpkin Eater is a domestic drama but that label just seems so limiting and inexact for a film that often seems like a horror film without the violence. The tenor of it really comes across in this scene, which doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot or to establish Bancroft’s character really, but it certainly gives you a good sense of what the movie is like right off the bat:

The basic idea is that Jo, Bancroft’s character, is a warm and loving woman who cares most about family and loves to have children, while Finch’s character is a highly ambitious screenwriter who mainly seeks success. The conflict between the two is inevitable, as Bancroft is lifted up in the world because of Finch’s career but becomes increasingly more miserable in the process. The brilliant conceit of this movie is just how overtly feminist the film is (particularly one released in 1964!) while having a main character who would not call herself a feminist and almost certainly doesn’t see herself as one, but the movie shows exactly how her autonomy, up to and including her control over her own body, is steadily chipped away by the men in her life, namely Finch and her own father. The two men ship off Jo’s two older boys to boarding school as a condition of paying for the wedding (which is a setup for one of the many gut punches the film has to offer: Jo sees them again many months later, during which time private school has transformed them into little versions of her father who have nothing to say to her), but this is just the beginning of a gauntlet of torment for Jo, which includes isolation, abortion, and even a hysterectomy (!) as she gives up everything she values in the vain hopes of getting back from Finch what she so freely gives to him: love and acceptance. So there’s a strong feminist bent to the film, but there’s also some sharp class commentary because we are introduced to Jo in an obviously lower-middle class milieu but when we meet her father, he’s a super-rich dude, so it immediately suggests a backstory of estrangement and sacrifice without saying even a single word about it. Jo clearly left a richer and more comfortable life because she couldn’t be happy within its value structure, but the tragedy of her relationship with Finch is that she gets pulled right back into that sort of life, with all of those same expectations and judgments. She can’t avoid it because she truly does love Peter Finch. For all the times we’ve heard about how romantic love is a curse or a disease, this movie might make the best case for that idea of any that I’ve seen.

It might be easy to get the impression that this movie is a woman good/man evil story, but the movie actually goes to some lengths to avoid making it that simple. Finch’s character is the antagonist of the film but in all fairness he does try to involve Bancroft in his world, invites her to come by the set and meet his coworkers, with whom she does not get along at all. And it’s pretty clear that his frustration with the marriage is that his wife doesn’t care about his success or the things that it’s bought them: there’s a pretty clear streak of “Why aren’t you appreciative?” that clearly baffles him. Finch is a pretty common sort, a man who sees himself as important and impressive and whose frustration with his wife for (in his mind) not appreciating him properly leads him to step out with women who do find him impressive. These details aren’t by any means redemptive of a character who is quite callous and selfish throughout the film, but they do give the character depth and a great degree of plausibility. Another interesting detail is that the Bancroft character doesn’t seem to have any religious faith: there’s no quiverfull type of motivation behind having a lot of children, she just likes having them. It makes sense given her own class origin, and it keeps the feminist and class critiques clear. Extremely large families used to occur due to various circumstances but maybe the biggest one was the lack of female autonomy: things like birth control and abortion gave women more control over their bodies, and when they were introduced, women typically decided to use them to have fewer children. The Pumpkin Eater has these tools used against one specific woman in a way that takes that control away, which could have been an offensive disaster if handled poorly. Thankfully it’s handled extremely well here, and the notion that the things that liberate us can frequently be turned against us is something that we need to be constantly reminded of.

There’s so much more to say about this film. The acting is on point, both Bancroft and Finch know every inch of these characters and play them beautifully, and the supporting turn by James Mason is satisfyingly crazy. Mason played a seemingly endless string of controlled and dignified men, so seeing him get unwound when Finch starts sleeping with his wife really just fits the movie and makes his part in it all the more electrifying. The technical aspects are also incredible: the visual style reminded me of Kubrick at many points, and the sound design is so goddamn good, such as the scene where Bancroft is flicking through a catalog (remember those?) with Peter Finch in the room and just the snapping of the pages makes the scene, gets across perfectly her anger at him all on its own. There are also some nice stylistic touches too, like the reversed film after the seeming final break between Bancroft and Finch. Seeing the smoke going back into the cigarette is a nice little image to show just how nonsensical and wrong things are in this little world. This movie is a continual reminder at how good British cinema was during the ’60s, a greatness that like much else in that nation would soon be on the decline as that industry quickly transformed into a distribution system for prestige historical dramas and literary adaptations, to the exclusion of everything else. The primalness of something like The Pumpkin Eater and many of the other classics of that decade were unfortunately forgotten in the process. Anyway, go do yourself a favor and watch it. It just got taken off of Amazon Prime but you can buy/rent it on YouTube, among other places.