The Stepford Wives at 50: a compelling thought in quest of a greater film

The funniest working joke in The Stepford Wives, a horror/satire a couple of village teeming with glamorous homemakers with pristine kitchens and serene grins, is that the lads are all wildly overmatched. They’re just like the nerds who received the promenade queens, besides even nerds have an anticipated degree of intelligence and persona, nonetheless socially awkward they could seem. These drips are higher understood as nondescript: a couple of of them are balding and one other has a speech obstacle, however they’re united principally in feeling entitled to the docile magnificence their junior govt salaries ought to afford them. When two ladies new to city overhear a Stepford spouse within the throes of ardour – “You’re the king, Frank!” – they know one thing’s up.

Tailored from novelist Ira Levin’s follow-up to Rosemary’s Child, The Stepford Wives has loved a sturdy cultural shelf-life within the 50 years for the reason that authentic 1975 model, however it’s all the time been stronger as an thought than a murals in any type. (The much less mentioned concerning the 2004 adaptation, a noxious camp comedy starring Nicole Kidman, the higher.) It was a direct affect on the good Jordan Peele horror-comedy Get Out and the not-so-brilliant Olivia Wilde thriller Don’t Fear Darling, which every happen in “idyllic” communities based on sinister social engineering. Referring to somebody as a “Stepford spouse” has grow to be a handy shorthand for compliant ladies who places the wants of males above their very own wishes and ambitions. (Amy Dunne in Gone Lady referred to such regressive varieties in her “Cool Lady” speech.)

As a cultural object, The Stepford Wives stays an enchanting barometer of a rustic nonetheless reacting to a ladies’s liberation motion that was redefining gender roles and upending typical relationships. The village of Stepford is a logo of patriarchal resistance, imagining what would possibly occur if garden-variety misogyny had been taken to the furthest excessive. What’s significantly potent about this fantasy is the concept of changing impartial, cosmopolitan ladies into compliant housewives. It’s not sufficient for these males to need fantasy babes. They need to overcome progress, too.

After breaking by means of as a younger actor in two benchmarks of the late 60s, The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child, Katharine Ross was in her mid-30s when she was forged as Joanna Eberhart in The Stepford Wives, and he or she keys in on the restlessness of her character. Joanna is the mom of two young children and married to Walter (Peter Masterson), a bland however secure businessman who has cajoled her into leaving Manhattan for this village in Connecticut. She likes town and desires to be a profitable photographer, however the time on that dream is working out and he or she doesn’t appear to have the vitality to struggle Walter about fleeing to the house and tranquility of Connecticut.

As soon as in Stepford, nonetheless, Joanna quickly turns into unnerved over the gussied-up ladies in frilly attire who hold stunning properties and have suggestions for nice recipes and family merchandise, however are in any other case empty home goddesses. She finally finds one other impartial thinker in Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and the 2 try to start out up a ladies’s group as a response to the Stepford Males’s Affiliation, a secretive group that has lured Walter as its newest recruit. A sequence of weird incidents lead Joanna and Bobbie to consider that one thing disturbing has occurred to the opposite wives in Stepford, however they must unravel the conspiracy earlier than it unravels them.

Scripted by the white-hot screenwriter William Goldman, who gained the Oscar for Butch Cassidy and would win once more a 12 months later with All of the President’s Males, The Stepford Wives tries to perform as a satirical Invasion of the Physique Snatchers, however its British director, Bryan Forbes (Séance on a Moist Afternoon), doesn’t have the vitality for it. The movie is neither as chilling nor as humorous because it intends to be, and solely fitfully presents tantalizing glimpses of what might need been. Given the scope of the conspiracy – to not point out the immense creep issue – The Stepford Wives ought to crackle with paranoia and rigidity, however Forbes’s intuition is to underplay the whole lot. Solely the frisky, wisecracking Prentiss appears to know the task.

But these standout moments are sufficient to account for why The Stepford Wives hasn’t light away. The sequences the place the Stepford ladies glitch are concurrently hilarious and unsettling, like when one downplays a fender bender on the grocery retailer by repeating the identical line on a loop (“That is all so foolish”) and does so once more at a celebration, when she tells the friends, “I’ll simply die if I don’t get this recipe,” and it appears actually true. And although Joanna’s pursuit of the reality isn’t the white-knuckle affair Forbes needs it to be, her confrontation along with her personal facsimile is an unforgettable shock. Her doppelgänger is “good” for extracting her persona and soul, and simply maintaining her accessible physique.

That no ladies had been concerned in any iteration of The Stepford Wives accounts for a few of its issues, too. As a lot because the story is about what misogynists need from their companions – “I like to observe ladies doing little home chores,” says the chief of the Males’s Affiliation – there’s a motive why feminists didn’t embrace the 1975 model and why current movies directed by ladies like Don’t Fear Darling and Barbie have used the Stepford affect to their very own ends. After a half-century, The Stepford Wives continues to be an awesome conceit in perpetual want of a rewrite.