"The Pumpkin Eater"

This is one of the few James Mason movies I really didn't care for too much. I wasn't thrilled with "Cold Sweat" either but that was really a Charles Bronson movie and he does nothing for me, absolutely nothing. All he ever does is star in ultraviolent movies. Watching that one was an ordeal.

This one was probably supposed to be more artsy. Anne Bancroft played a woman who seems to like to be perpetually pregnant. She leaves her first husband (presumably) and brings her 5 kids with her to live with husband #2 who stole her out from the first husband's nose. She is happy to be hausfrau and Momma, and really in 1964 when the film was made that was a woman's role anyway, so I don't know why people in the film are critical of her for it.

She finds out that her husband is cheating on her, and wanders through most of the rest of the film looking beautiful but pathetically sad. After a while I was tempted to say, "So what??" After all, he's right, when he says to her at one point that she wasn't a model of fidelity either. Most of the film is about her sufferings. She's lovely, she looks like a Jackie Onassis type in all those early sixties getups, but it got boring watching her sad doe eyes.

As for James Mason, he did a good acting job as always, but the character he portrayed was not simply a bad guy and surely wasn't a sexy bad guy. He was just plain despicable. Her husband was having an affair with his wife so he met her at the zoo, surrounded by all her kids, and told her about it in the ugliest possible way. He also made an insulting play for her apparently meant as revenge on her husband.

I was pleased to have seen the movie but I don't expect to be watching it again. It's too depressing. There were a few scenes that were pretty steamy for 1964, but they weren't enough to make it worth seeing over. This one I would miss.