The Stepford Wives (1975)

 

The Stepford Wives (1975)

 

I’m barely old enough to remember this film when it first came out, and returning to it now, reading later Critics, I was shocked to see how many naively claimed its Satire was “dated.”

 

Ahem, as Critic John Kenneth Muir stated, this is "a film essay about what it means to be part of an unspoken ‘underclass.’" Though women benefit from the wealth of our nation is as much as her partner does, do any of you really believe that this culture respects women? They’re still battling for basic control of their own bodies. They’re still paid less than a man for doing the same job. A former President of the USA, who is again a Presidential hopeful, bragged about sexual assaults against them has embraced other men who are famous sexual predators. The role of women in our Society is best demonstrated by how the dying wish of one of our Greatest Feminist Heroes, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s, was brushed aside as inconsequential and her heir, appointed by the above-mentioned Sex-Offender, was revealed as a follower of The People Who Praise, whose ideology demands strict Gender-Role Divisions, emphasizes Women's Submission, and preached Secrecy toward outsiders.

 

This is all recent history, this film decades old and a pretty faithful adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name (first published in 1972), and the story then, is the story now. Though it was set then-contemporaneously, it used Troupes that we usually associate with Future-set fictions, a Dystopian SF where Society controlled by a Cabal of Secret Masters who have created Androids indistinguishable from Humans. The Androids were replacement for those too difficult to control and completely submissive to their Masters.

 

These were not a new ideas in SF, stories of such Doppelgangers replacing World Leaders had been a Genre-staple since at least the 1950s, but the difference here is the Secret Masters were not Aliens or Agents of an Illuminati, but a bunch of Suburban husbands, and they’re not over-throwing the Government, but getting rid of their recently uppity-wives. They are precursors of vile, but lauded by some, Predators like Andrew Tate and alleged Philosophers like Jordan Peterson panicking about a "crisis of masculinity," "backlash against masculinity" and that the "masculine spirit is under assault." The entire “Alpha Male” movement seems to be a public expression of the panicked fragility of immature Trolls fearful of the loss of some entitlements that I doubt few to them ever actually enjoyed, and a resentment escalating towards hate at the women whose every act of self-assertiveness and self-definition is perceived as a threat.

 

The book came about a decade after Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (first published 1963) which has been credited in sparking what we now call “Second-Wave Feminism.” Friedan retold the tales of Suburban Housewives how felt they had lost their identities in the post-WWII push to create domestic stability. All of the mass advertisements and new household conveniences seemed to be painting over their personalities with an artificial façade. This bereft, but economically powerful, group created a “Women’s Movement,” a substantive revolt by an unacknowledged underclass. It sparked an angry counter-reaction, and though the backlash against Feminism was less violence than that against the Civil Rights movement, it was still plenty ugly.

 

Levin, a male writer whose work often addressed abusive relationships between controlling men and unsuspecting women, had lived in Wilford, Connecticut during the 1960s, and apparently didn’t like it. He’s on record as saying that the fictional town of Stepford is based on Wilford and I’m sure they’ve never forgiven him. His book, and this film, came at an interesting juncture, with women had been entering the work-force and the political arena like never before, but Popular Culture, especially Genre Fiction, was not especially welcoming. As Real-Life women became more assertive, our advertising, books, movies, and TV increasingly sexualized and bimboized them. The Crime and Horror Genres specifically wallowed in explicit violence against them.

 

Regarding what I’ve already said, yes, there were spoilers in there, but not serious ones. Though the story is told as a Mystery, the audience solves it faster than the Protagonist. Also, the novel was hugely popular, and the phrase, “Stepford Wife,” had already become slang for an excessively submissive woman before the film was released. Even the marque poster broadly hinted at the film’s “surprise” ending.

 

In the story, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), has just arrived with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and children to the idyllic and affluent town, eager to start a new life from the bad-influences of New York City. But loneliness quickly sets in for Joanna; her husband is increasingly distant and irritable, and spending more-and-more time at the Men’s Association, an organization she thinks is dominated by insufferable stuffed-shirts. Many of the town’s women also annoy her, they seem artificially perfect and intellectually vacant.

 

Joanna finds some solace with irrepressible but unhappily-married Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss) and the surprisingly sophisticated trophy-wife Charmaine Wimperis (Tina Louise). The three organize a Women’s Liberation meeting, but the gathering is a failure when the other wives continually divert the discussion to cleaning products.

 

OK, this film is often club-footedly obvious, and Director Bryan Forbes does have some serious first- and second-act pacing problems. Evidence of padding can be seen in the fact that the book it’s based is about half-the-length of Levin’s other famous Horror novel “Rosemary’ Baby” (1967) but this film adaptation comes in only twenty-minutes shorter that the “Rosemary’s Baby” adaptation (1968). Still, its virtues far-outweigh its flaws.

 

It is blessed with an excellent eye, and as the basic set-up is laid down, the Suburbs are made creepy with images of perfection seething with poison; this is especially notable in the beautifully shot Supermarket scenes. I can’t help but think Cinematographer Owen Roizman, one of that decade’s finest, consciously borrowed from what George Lucas, David Myers and Albert Kihn did on the Futuristic Dystopian SF film “THX 1138” (1971). Said Nanette Newman, one of the Actresses in the film, “A lot of horror movies are dark and gloomy and sinister, but this was a horror that was in sunlight with beautiful surroundings and beautiful people. It made it so it lulled you along until it finally terrified you.”

 

Also, the female Cast is excellent (though some of the male Performers are weak). The two real standouts are Actresses Ross and Prentis, they bring not only believability, but passion to their roles. These are Heroines you can’t help but root for, even if they are a little too slow on the up-take, and their nightmarish fates are as Tragic as they are Scary.

 

The Acting was highly praised in even negative reviews, but always the focus was almost always on Ross and Prentis. The Actresses playing more vacuous women deserve some credit too, as Critic Roger Ebert was one of the few who addressed them, "[The actresses] have absorbed enough TV, or have such an instinctive feeling for those phony, perfect women in the ads, that they manage all by themselves to bring a certain comic edge to their cooking, their cleaning, their gossiping and their living deaths."

 

When the absurdly submissive housewife, Carol Van Sant (Newman’s part), is in a car accident and displays odd, repetitive behavior, we in the audience know she’s a Android even though Joanna isn’t ready to make that leap. Then Joanna and Bobbie get seriously disturbed and Charmaine starts acting more like a Wind-Up Doll. Then, (and this is where the film starts to stray very significantly from the book) there’s a really chilling scene, Bobbie starts acting like a Doll too, and this escalates into violence. Finally, Joanna, until then more uncertain in her rebellion than her two allies, fights back, but it’s too late, and the ending is truly the stuff of Nightmares.

 

The screenplay was by William Goldman, considered one of the greatest living Screenwriters and hired before Director Forbes. Goldman didn’t much like what Forbes did, he later claimed the film "could have been very strong, but it was rewritten and altered, and I don't think happily."

 

The best documented of these changes concerned casting and costuming choices. Says Actor Masterson, “When Bill Goldman wrote the script, he said he intended for it to be a bunch of Playboy Bunnies.”

 

Notable regarding this was casting of the Newman, she was age-appropriate for her late-middle-aged husband (Josef Sommer), so not a Playboy Bunny. A plot-point was that her character was sexually compliant, but Forbes make a point of having her sexually uninteresting at the same time (and the Actress and Director were married, the stuff we do for art). Regarding the importance of this casting choice, a blogger named Princess Weekes hit the nail on the head, it was, “because the point of the book isn’t that the men want sexual objects, they just want objects.”

 

Forbes also dressed Actresses Ross and Prentis in the film’s sexier garb, then-popular crop tops and short shorts, while the Stepford wives all wore pastels, long dresses, and lots of ruffles. That costuming may have been problematic to some aspects of the film’s themes, but worked perfectly in the Supermarket scenes, the strongest images early in the film.

 

Though the film was modestly successful and more respected as time went on, it initially faced an extreme back-lash from an unexpected source. Columbia Pictures invited Feminist Activists to a screening, and the NY Times reported it was a complete disaster, full of “hisses, groans, and guffaws.” Though the film was essentially a SF dramatization of many of the ideas in Friedan’s seminal book, Friedan proved to be the films harshest critic, she “stood and with a voice quivering with emotion said: ‘I think we should all leave here. I don't think we should help publicize this movie. It's a rip‐off of the women's movement,’” then “stomped out of the screening room.”

 

Umm…why the hating?

 

At the time, there were a bare-few widely released books, films, or TV shows that emphasized Feminist characters. This was among the first major motion pictures to address their grievances and make them the Heroes. The brand of Sexism it targeted was both the least articulated but most entrenched, the kind that is friendly on the surface and dark underneath. SF cinema and TV, specifically, had been bold in recognizing women’s expanding roles in many professions, but though “Fantastic Voyage” (1966) and “Star Trek” (TV series first aired in 1966) moved women into responsible and active roles in a man’s world, but the dialogue was all-to-often belittling. This was a Moral Fable of how narrow-minded assumptions of appropriate Sex-Roles could turn Murderously Evil.

 

I see four possibilities:

 

First, girls just didn’t like Horror movies. I doubt this is even close to being a full answer, but it is true the Horror audience is largely male, and more so then than now. The lack of a female audience encouraged the Genre’s Misogyny, and the Genre’s Misogyny additionally alienated any possible female Audience.

 

Second, and more likely, is that Levin, Goldman, and Forbes, were all men, and women resented men speaking for them in venues where they were unwelcome. Though women directors starting getting some prominence during the 1970s, it was mostly a foreign phenomenon. When this film came out, it seems that Elaine May was the only working female Director in Hollywood.

 

A third possibility, now seemingly unlikely, but what the stunned Cast and Crew believed, was that the Feminists simply missed the point entirely; that the Feminists somehow thought that this Dystopia was supposed to be about the creation of a Utopia, basically that they saw the film’s Villains as being presented as the Heroes.

 

Actress Louise said of Author Friedan, “She was very upset about our movie. Very upset. She thought Ira Levin was saying that’s the way things should be, but he didn’t feel that way at all.”

 

Actress Newman, defending Director her husband’s intentions, “Bryan always used to say, ‘If anything, it’s anti-men!' If the men are really stupid enough to want wives like that, then it’s sad for them. I thought the men were ridiculous to want to make women into servile creatures.”

 

Director Forbes was even accosted by a woman wielding an umbrella. Newman described it, “I wasn’t there, but I remember him telling me, ‘My God, some madwoman attacked me with an umbrella and told me that I’m anti-women!'”

 

Actress Prentiss added, “It’s the first of the women’s-lib kind of movies. It isn’t pounding you on the head. It’s doing it through horror and comedy, and that’s a good genre.”

 

Option four has to do with the film’s intersection with Friedan’s book, a notable aspect of the book is though it was an angry analysis, it never degenerated into being anti-men. The above-referenced NY Times article includes this telling quote, “‘I think it's completely ridiculous,’ said Linda Arkin, a writer, who was the first to speak up in the ‘awareness session.’ ‘I couldn't believe the film. It dumps on everyone—women, men, suburbia. It confirms every fear we've ever had about the battle of the sexes, and it says there is no way for people to get together and lead human lives.’”

 

You know, the fourth option sounds a lot like the first, girls just don’t like Horror movies.

 

Even in its day, the movie had some Feminist defenders, like Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry, and is now broadly accepted by that group today. Time was kind to this film because of the potency of its central metaphor. Despite frequent accusations of the film being dated, it became a franchise, with three made-for-TV sequels across the next two decades (1980 through 1996) which were appallingly bad, and could’ve hurt the original films’ reputation except that I doubt many of you reading this even know these sequels exist. It was also re-made as a comedy in 2004 with a lavish budgeted and all-star Cast, which that renewed interest in the original, but all agreed that the remake paled in comparison.

 

Interest in this film was renewed again in 2017 when Director Jordan Peele’s ground-breaking Horror-film “Get Out” proved a huge Commercial and Critical success. Peele was quite open about “Stepford Wives” being key influence, and I’d say Peele’s film was “Stepford Wives” only worthy heir. Let’s jettison everything that came in between and call “Stepford Wives” and “Get Out” one of the most successful franchises in the history of SF/Horror.

 

Trailer:

Trailer: The Stepford Wives (1975) (youtube.com)