Penelope Mortimer

Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is paralysed by triviality, measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties, routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town, their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself.

Portrait of a woman four times married, her "teams" of children, and how, in crisis, she comes to terms with the ideal and the real.

Ann Lake goes to pick up her daughter, Bunny, at a London preschool but is told that they have no child registered by that name. The police can find no evidence that Bunny ever existed and wonder if the child was only a fantasy of Ann's.

Anne Bancroft's cathartic lead performance anchors The Pumpkin Eater, Harold Pinter's harrowing, elliptical tale of marital dissatisfaction. Though much of the film concerns her character's fitful bouts with depression, Bancroft charges every moment she's onscreen, employing an array of subtle gestures and facial expressions to convey what her repressed character cannot. Pinter and director Jack Clayton never resort to facile satire or pat assignations...