According to the BFI 's '' Monthly Film Bulletin '' , " There is something phantasmally absurd about this well-meaning , ambitious film ... It could well be that Pinter 's brilliance is altogether the wrong kind of brilliance to let loose on the scripting of this already nerve-raw , nightmarish subject . Jo ... makes an eminently worthwhile , but virtually intractable , subject for a film : worthwhile because neurotics rarely get a square , sympathetic , penetrating deal in the cinema ; intractable because , like many neurotics , she is a fixated and evidently crashing bore , and one of the most difficult things to do is to present a bore fairly without at the same time boring your audience too . Part of their tragedy is that bores , willy-nilly , seem often ridiculous . So the last thing a seriously-intentioned writer can afford to do is heap further grotesqueries upon them . But this is what has happened in Pinter 's often genuinely amusing script . For every justified extravagance - in the characteristically ghastly party scene , for instance , or Maggie Smith 's gushing fatuities as Philpott - there are a dozen which are not . The poor , crazy lady in the hair-dresser 's is a schematic and surely rather portentous case in point ; so is the Zoo , and Harrods , Jo 's gloomy hats , and that windmill love nest , and the tiresome ambiguity of that psychiatrist off to Tenerife ( is he perceptive , or unsympathetic , a good doctor or just a fashionable one ? ) . Doubtless , some kind of pseudo-Antonioni , pseudo-Fellini comment is being made on our society , but if this is indeed so , then the glee and the ambivalence are significantly more telling , and certainly more apparent , than any clarity of focus . " According to '' Time '' magazine , " The Pumpkin Eater of the nursery rhyme 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 . " Of Bancroft 's character , for the '' New York Herald Tribune '' , Judith Crist , commented that she " seems a cow-like creature with no aspirations or intellect above her pelvis " . A reviewer for '' Variety '' wrote : " Pinter 's script vividly brings to life the principal characters in this story of a shattered marriage , though Pinter 's resort to flashback technique is confusing in the early stages . Jack Clayton 's direction gets off to a slow , almost casual start , but the pace quickens as the drama becomes more intense . " The film has continued to provoke comments . In a 1999 obituary for Penelope Mortimer , Giles Gordon in '' The Guardian '' characterized Harold Pinter as someone who values what is " written between the lines " , making him " her ideal translator and interpreter " for the film adaptation of Mortimer 's novel . In 2006 , David Hare wrote that , " Pinter regularly offers actors what will become the opportunities of a lifetime : to Meryl Streep , obviously , in '' The French Lieutenant 's Woman '' ; to Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft in one of the most over-looked of all British films , '' The Pumpkin Eater '' ; and , unforgettably , to Dirk Bogarde , both in '' Accident '' and '' The Servant '' . " Anne Bancroft won the award for Best Actress at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival , and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress . She was also nominated for the Best Actress at the 37th Academy Awards , losing that award to Julie Andrews ( who won for her role in '' Mary Poppins '' ) . Harold Pinter won the 1964 BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay
1964 Cannes Film Festival
1964 Cannes Film Festival
The Pumpkin Eater