The Stepford Wives
by Bryan Forbes
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Actor: Katharine Ross, Nanette Newman, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson, Tina LouiseDirector: Bryan Forbes
Brand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
Cinematographer: Owen Roizman
Editor: Timothy Gee
Producer: Edgar J. Scherick
Producer: Gustave M. Berne
Producer: Roger M. Rothstein
Writer: Ira Levin
Writer: William Goldman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-15
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of The Stepford Wives
DVD Review: I'll just die if I don't get that recipe. . .
Summary: 4 Stars
This 1975 film is based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, who also wrote "Rosemary's Baby", "A Kiss Before Dying", and "This Perfect Day" (and why the latter hasn't been made into a film yet is beyond my comprehension). The excellent script is by William Goldman.
The premise of the story (a group of men in a wealthy Connecticut suburb figure out a way to knock off their wives and replace them with compliant, eternally young, robotic replacements so lifelike that the rest of the world can't detect the physical difference) would have been utterly unfilmable were it not so obviously meant to be allegorical. The tenor of the times must be taken into consideration, as well, for the film's timeliness in 1975 was its satirical response to the backlash against the first wave of feminism that had taken place.
The 2004 remake is so awful as not to deserve even one viewing, but the original, although it doesn't really answer some of the very questions it begs about the nature of intimate relationships, still makes for suspenseful viewing just by posing the questions. The premise works because there is just enough suspicion buried in most women's hearts that most men, in THEIR hearts, would prefer an eternally beautiful, utterly pliant, sexually undemanding, brainless robot to the complexities of intimacy with a living, breathing, intelligent, three-dimensional, adult woman with distinct needs and ideas.
Walter and Joanna Eberhart live in a crowded Manhattan apartment with their two children and a dog. Joanna is a talented photographer who has been home with the children for some years and is beginning to get restless. She adores the gritty and intellectually stimulating city life, but Walter, a high-earning corporate lawyer, hates the crime, the dirt, and the cramped quarters, and thinks it's time to move to a a big house with a lawn in a manicured suburb filled with white Republicans. He is less than enthused about Joanna's wish to step outside homemaking and see if she can make something of her photography.
When Walter suggests a move to the suburbs to Joanna, she is not happy, and even less so when she finds out that Walter has already found the town and the house he thinks they should all live in, and bought the house. Joanna is presented with a fait accompli - something Walter apparently has a habit of doing. Of course, why a brainy, accomplished woman like Joanna has ended up married to a narcissistic d*** like Walter is never explained.
Joanna grudgingly agrees to give suburban life a try, and in no time, we see the family driving up to Connecticut, to the town of Stepford, where Walter has purchased a large, beautiful colonial-style white house with hardwood floors and bay windows and crown moldings and fireplaces and all those details that make people rush out to buy homes like that, situated on a country road lined with big trees. Everything is clean and bright and Anglo-Saxon. Their new next-door neighbor, Carol Van Sant (Nanette Newman), who exhibits a somewhat fey affect and is wearing an outfit reminiscent of "Little House on the Prairie", brings over a homemade casserole to tide the family through Moving Day. After supper, we see Walter and Ted Van Sant (Josef Somer) nodding conspiratorially together as Walter whispers, "She looks as good as she cooks, Ted!".
It does't take long for Stepford to pall on Joanna. For one thing, there is that Men's Club that Walter tells her he's thinking of joining, whose meetings take place in a large house of Gothic aspect that could serve as a site for a Hawthorne story. Walter follows his habit of asking her opinion on it when, as she knows perfectly well, he has already joined. He brings the Men's Club home for coffee one evening, and as she entertains them, one of their members, who turns out to be a professional advertising artist, begins to sketch Joanna from various angles (he is actually meant to be the man who did all those idealized Breck Girl portraits - remember them?!). Another asks if she will help him with a regional accent recognition project he's doing, and provide him with an exhaustive recording of common words from A-Z. Walter looks on unconcerned as all this takes place.
And then Joanna meets The Wives, who are an oddly mixed group. There's Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and Charmaine (Tina Louise), who clearly aren't happy with their lives in Stepford, either - but the rest are all women who live to shop, iron, cook, and clean. You can spot these women a mile off by their clothes: long, frilly dresses and big hats, and by their kitchens: always spotlessly clean. At their very first community social event, a barbecue, the feckless Carol van Sant has a minor "breakdown" and walks around the pool with an hor d'oeuvre in her hand repeating, "I'll just die if I don't get this recipe!". Ted takes his wife home, blaming the little scene on her inability to tolerate alcohol, but Joanna and Bobbie are horrified when, the next day, Carol shows up to apologize for her behavior, and lets it slip that the Men's Club is sending her around to apologize to everyone who was at the barbecue.
Well, it's just a matter of time before Joanna begins to be not just bored in Stepford, but suspicious. She and Bobbie become close friends, partners in their mutual suburban misery. One day, they knock on Charmaine's door, only to back away in shock when the feisty tennis player opens the door in a long dress, murmuring happily about all the pretty new clothes her husband has given her, now that she's letting him turn her beloved tennis court into a swimming pool. Bobbie and Joanna are so alarmed by Charmaine's "conversion" that they have the town water analyzed, but no mysterious drug is found in it.
The increasingly nervous Joanna begins to see a therapist to air her fears, and tells Walter that she wants to move away from Stepford as soon as possible. To her surprise, Walter is very understanding and promises to put the house up for sale right away.
Alas, if only it were the water! On a rainy night when Joanna can no longer live with her mounting fears, she comes home from her therapy session, planning to grab the children, pile them into the car, and run for it, but the house is dark and the children are gone. She goes to Bobbie's house to ask if they are there, and is stunned when her friend opens the door in a ruffled blouse and long flowered skirt, and takes her into a sparkling kitchen that used to look as if a tornado had gone through it. When Joanna tries to convey her terror to Bobbie, and her suspicion that the word lists and the Men's Club are somehow all mixed up in these extraordinary personality changes, Bobbie will only reply that what she needs is a good cup of coffee. In her frustrated terror, Joanna picks up a kitchen knife and thrusts it into Bobbie's pelvis - and sees that the truth is far more terrible than her worst suspicions about doctored water, hypnosis, mind control, etc. Joanna cuts a few wires as she stabs Bobbie, who starts to move erratically and hilariously around the kitchen, dumping cups of coffee on the floor and repeating indignantly, "I thought we were friends; I thought we were friends; I thought. . ."
Joanna rushes to the Men's Club, where she thinks her children are being held, and is at last confronted with the full horror of what has been going on in Stepford. There, upstairs, is the not quite finished robotic replica of herself, in a replica of Joanna's own bedroom, sitting at a replica of her own vanity, dressed in a beautiful negligee - through which shows a noticeably larger bosom than Joanna's own. The family dog, who disappeared inexplicably shortly after the Eberharts moved to Stepford, is ensconced on the bed - obviously there to get used to the new model of his mistress and not give her away when she takes over Joanna's life. Nearly complete, the only thing the New Improved Joanna is missing are her eyes, which are still dark pools of emptiness, although she smiles sweetly as she gets up and moves gracefully toward Joanna, twisting a chiffon scarf tightly in her hands.
The fabled last scene of the movie takes place in a supermarket almost as immaculate as the homes it serves, as the Stepford Wives glide along its aisles in long dresses, white gloves, and picture hats, greeting each other placidly as they fill up their carts with oven cleaner, Ajax, laundry detergent, and Pledge.
However, over in another aisle, we see what is probably filmdom's first black yuppie couple, quarreling, as the husband hisses that the wife should at least give the place a chance, look how nice and clean it is here, while the wife complains bitterly she doesn't know why he brought her here, this is the whitest place she has ever seen . . .they are still bickering ominously as the fadeout begins on Joanna's empty, smiling face.
"The Stepford Wives" makes "Aliens" look like a scholarly paper in The Scientific American. But allegories make their point in broad and oversimplified brushstrokes. This particular allegory illuminates a less admirable corner of the male id, but it works because of the suspicion, not exactly allayed by a review of gender history, that that corner still exists, and that given immunity from punishment or the disapproval of the larger social order, it would reactivate. If this were not the case, this would be a comedy, and would never have worked as a suspense film.
Stylishly done and well-performed by all hands, the film manages to draw the viewer in to its illogical allegorical world, despite the logical questions that arise almost immediately. Katharine Ross is excellent, and Paula Prentiss oddly touching as the exuberant, funny Bobbie - they makes us hope desperately that both will somehow escape the fate of the other Stepford Wives. That we are devastated when they do not is evidence of how seriously we still take the allegory's point.
Description of The Stepford Wives
Classic Stepford Wives story with Katherine Ross.Bestsellers in DVD
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