Jo (Bancroft), a war widow with six children, leaves her second husband, a musician, for screenplay writer Jake (Peter Finch). Smothered by his new brood, Jake proves unfaithful, brazenly moving a young lover (Maggie Smith) into the house and having on-location trysts with starlets once his movie career takes off, whereas Jo seeks her identity through motherhood, only later to be coerced into abortion and hysterectomy by Jake. When Jo's hard-won capacity for denial is confronted by one of the cuckolded husbands (James Mason), she flees back into the arms of her ex-husband and then to the house she and Jake are building from a converted windmill. Her days of solitude are finally interrupted by her family, including a contrite Jake, and they reconcile. Their marriage serves to illustrate how mutual attraction can quickly devolve into mutual torture when angst and neuroses are allowed free rein, yet the emotional ties that bind stay.
Bancroft imbues Jo with a pathos that makes it difficult to judge her as pathetic. Her craft can be commended for the seemingly effortless move from maternal instinct to jealous rage over the live-in lover Philpot, as well as in the underplayed breakdown at Harrod's. However, it's probably to Pinter's credit that the crucial scene in the beauty shop comes off as borderline unreal. Did Jo's own guilty imagination put those words in her neighbor's mouth? And does it really matter?