The Stepford Wives (1975) - film review

Walter and Joanna Eberhart are a typical middleclass American couple.  He is a successful lawyer, she is an aspiring photographer.  One day, Walter decides to uproot his family and move out of busy New York City into the sleepy Connecticut suburb of Stepford.  Not long after arriving in the quiet picturesque little town, Joanna notices how subservient most of the women are to their husbands.  They have no interest outside the family home and are more than content to spend their hours cleaning, cooking and servicing their husbands’ conjugal needs.   The only woman who appears not to have made herself a domestic slave is Charmaine Wimperis, another newcomer to Stepford.  With her help, Joanna attempts to found a women’s group, but none of the other women in the town is interested.  Realising that something is wrong and afraid that she too may metamorphose into a kitchen-bound housewife, Joanna tries to persuade her husband that they should move.  Walter assures her that she is overreacting and suggests she should see a psychiatrist.  Joanna’s anxieties turn to horror when her friend Charmaine suddenly becomes like every other wife in Stepford...

Possibly the weirdest pro-feminist film ever made.  When it was first released, The Stepford Wives was not well-received, but, thirty years on, it has acquired the status of a cult sci-fi horror classic.  The film has been criticised for its slow, uneven pace, but despite this is makes a compelling thriller, with an unmistakable air of menace and an undercurrent of dark humour.  The idea of a community of men setting out to create what is, from their point of view, the perfect world in which women exist merely to satisfy their needs, is both scary and hilarious.  It is also horrific when you realise that this is precisely what men have been trying to do since the dawn of time.  What The Stepford Wives presents is male chauvinism taken to its ultimate extreme.

An obvious variant on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the film is based on a popular novel by Ira Levin, who also penned such important works as Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil.  Bryan Forbes was a surprising choice to direct the film.  He had previously made just a handful of films, including the crime drama Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and the oddity Whistle Down the Wind (1961).  Forbes did not have an easy time making The Stepford Wives.  Right from the outset, he ran into difficulties with his screenwriter William Goldman, whose vision of the film differed markedly from his.  One of the biggest sources of contention was Forbes’ decision to cast his wife Nanette Newman as one of the titular wives.  In the end, it was Newman who provided the model for the look and behaviour of all of the Stepford wives.

The film had three made-for-television sequels: Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987) and The Stepford Husbands (1996), and was remade unsuccessfully in 2004 with Nicole Kidman in the lead role.  It has also inspired numerous paraodies and the mild green Nanette Newman reprised her role as the perfect housewife in a series of TV commercials for a well-known brand of washing up liquid, which are, in some respects, even more disturbing than this film.  It is quite possible that there are feminists who still burn effigies of Nanette Newman, rather than their bras, on a regular basis.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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