A Wife's Tale

The Pumpkin Eater of the nursery thyme 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.

Actress Bancroft, the Bronxish beatnik of Broadway's Two For the Seesaw and the iron-willed mentor of The Miracle Worker, stretches her talents to astonishing breadth as Mrs. Jake Armitage, a British matron who believes that incessant procreation is what's right with the world, not what's wrong with it. This elemental drive brings her a swarm of children and several hard-pressed husbands, the last of whom (Peter Finch) jolts her out of bovine contentment by becoming a rich and famous screen writer.

Suddenly cursed with leisure, with her children away at school or looked after by servants, she sits idly thumbing the pages of Vogue. Her husband loses himself in enterprises inimical to home life, and amuses himself with bits of accessible fluff. One day, while shopping at Harrods, the placid wife collapses in a fit of hysterical sobbing. The doctor comes. "A beautiful woman," her husband growls, "but all she wants to do is sit in a corner and give birth." She submits to sterilization at her husband's urging, only to learn that he has got another woman with child. Her pumpkin shell bursts. Alienated from husband, family and self, she flees into a brief affair, at last learns to accept her husband as flawed, faithless, tender, selfish and, for her, inevitable.

Though Pumpkin Eater in outline resembles a compendium of womanly woes, it plays like a house afire, almost invariably ignited by Actress Bancroft, who could probably strike dramatic lightning from a recitation of tide tables. Having tea at the zoo, she quietly distills despair while a prurient cuckold (James Mason) spews ugly revelations about her husband and his wife. Cornered under a hair dryer at a beauty salon, she blanches, feeling her own anguish cruelly parodied in a chance conversation with a venomous, cast-off drudge. And her spectacular scenes with Finch, pitched against the din of a more or less anonymous army of progeny, are a litany of love, hate, lies, jealousy and excruciating domestic boredom.

Scenarist Harold Pinter and Director Jack Clayton (Room At The Top) show proper scorn for the easy tricks of melodrama. Their unsentimental aim is to take a marriage apart and nail up the bleeding pieces for honest scrutiny. Often as not, they succeed, finding lethal words and crisp images to express the timeless battle that Author Mortimer describes as "men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion."

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