Word: pumpkins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PUMPKIN EATER. Anne Bancroft portrays with dazzling perception a well-kept British matron who endures three husbands, a swarm of children, and a nervous collapse before she realizes that all's not well in her pumpkin shell...
...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...
...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...
...into the air. In the last reel that nasty old Kobrak turns himself into Goliath's double, and at the climax Gordon beats Gordon to a bloody pulp, rips off his smiling mask, displays the inside of his head. It looks like the inside of a pumpkin...