Taglines: A very modern suspense story from the author of Rosemary’s Baby.
The Stepford Wives movie storyline. Joanna and Walter are the two newest residents in Stepford. Joanna, although a “housewife,” is intelligent and creative – taking an interest in photography: she wants to be “remembered”. Like many of the men in Stepford, Walter is an obviously inadequate husband. Conflict occurs when Joanna complains that Walter is making all of the decisions for them.
Walter joins the mysterious Stepford “Men’s Club”, which takes place in an old manor house, which is heavily guarded. Joanna is disturbed that many of the Stepford wives spend their lives in domestic servitude, are unintelligent and wear flowery print dresses. Her friend Bobbie thinks that it might be due to something in the water. At a consciousness-raising group that Joanna starts, the wives begin discussing spray starch and cleaning products.
The awful truth is that the men of Stepford are replacing their wives with compliant domestic sex robots. Gradually, Joanna begins to realize that all of her friends have been replaced, and that she is in great danger. Her psychiatrist advises that she take the kids and get “the hell out of Stepford”, but the men are hiding Joanna’s children. Can she find them, or will she be murdered and replaced by RoboJoanna?
The Stepford Wives is a 1975 American satirical horror film[4] directed by Bryan Forbes, written by William Goldman, and starring Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, and Peter Masterson. Its plot follows a woman who relocates with her husband and children from New York City to the Connecticut community of Stepford, where she comes to find the women live unwaveringly subservient lives to their husbands. The film is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Ira Levin.
Filmed in Connecticut in 1974, The Stepford Wives premiered theatrically in February 1975. It grossed $4 million at the United States box office, though it received mixed reviews from critics. Reaction from feminist activists and writers was extremely divisive at the time of its release, with Betty Friedan deeming it a “rip-off of the women’s movement” and discouraging women from seeing it, though others such as Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry defended the film.
While the film was a moderate success at the time of release, it has grown in stature as a cult film over the years. Building upon the reputation of Levin’s novel, the term “Stepford” or “Stepford wife” has become a popular science fiction concept and several sequels were shot, as well as a 2004 remake using the same title, but rewritten as a comedy instead of a serious horror / thriller film.
Film Review for The Stepford Wivesj/h3>
If television affects the way we think, dress and behave — and, heaven help us, I’m afraid it does — then someday we may all be a nation of those perfect plastic robots on TV. The ones who look human (well, humanoid), but who’ve fashioned a utopia out of this vale of tears by selecting and using the correct cosmetics, kitchen aids, toiletries and garbage bags. That may come someday. In the meantime, there are “The Stepford Wives.”
They seem fishy from the moment Joanna (Katharine Ross) arrives in the cozy suburb of Stepford. They don’t seem to do anything much, except keep up their images as perfect housewives and helpmates. They are doggedly devoted to their husbands, they are shapelier than your average female and they are obsessed to the point of frenzy with keeping their houses clean.
Joanna can’t stand these paragons, and neither can a couple of her friends, Bobby and Charmaine. They decide to hold a feminist consciousness-raising session, and it turns into a gruesome parody of a TV commercial. After the first three women explore their psyches for areas of vulnerability, the other ladies get involved in a heated discussion about various brands of cleansing powder. It’s all so eerie, especially after Charmaine goes away for the weekend and comes back as a zombie like the rest.
Bobby gets the notion that there must be something in Stepford itself — something in the drinking water, maybe? — that’s turning these women into parodies of the ideal housewife. She and Joanna take a water sample into the city, but that’s not it. And then, well, poor Bobby…. But I can’t give away too much of the plot, I suppose, even though the trailers and the TV ads probably do.
The movie is based on a novel by Ira Levin, who wrote “Rosemary’s Baby,” and maybe that provides a clue to its basic weakness: It’s never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment. I can imagine similar material being directed by, say, Woody Allen, and coming out pointed and funny. Instead, director Bryan Forbes gets all solemn and spooky and goes for obvious effects like bolts of lightning and forbidding Gothic mansions.
Since the material just plain doesn’t work on this level, the movie doesn’t work at all. But it’s an interesting conception. And the actresses involved (in addition to Miss Ross, there are Paula Prentiss looking splendidly leggy, Nanette Newman and Tina Louise) are good enough, or 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.
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Directed by: Bryan Forbes
Starring: Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson, Nanette Newman, Tina Louise, Patrick O’Neal, Judith Baldwin, Barbara Rucker, Franklin Cover, Michael Higgins, Robert Fields
Screenplay by: William Goldman
Production Design by: Gene Callahan
Cinematography by: Owen Roizman
Film Editing by: Timothy Gee
Costume Design by: Anna Hill Johnstone
Set Decoration by: Robert Drumheller
Music by: Michael Small
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: February 12, 1975
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