The funniest running joke in The Stepford Wives, a horror/satire about a village teeming with glamorous homemakers with pristine kitchens and serene grins, is that the men are all wildly overmatched. They’re like the nerds who got the prom queens, except even nerds have an expected level of intelligence and personality, however socially awkward they might appear. These drips are better understood as nondescript: a few of them are balding and another has a speech impediment, but they are united mostly in feeling entitled to the docile beauty their junior executive salaries should afford them. When two women new to town overhear a Stepford wife in the throes of passion – “You’re the king, Frank!” – they know something’s up.
Adapted from novelist Ira Levin’s follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives has enjoyed a robust cultural shelf-life in the 50 years since the original 1975 version, but it’s always been more potent as an idea than a work of art in any form. (The less said about the 2004 adaptation, a noxious camp comedy starring Nicole Kidman, the better.) It was a direct influence on the brilliant Jordan Peele horror-comedy Get Out and the not-so-brilliant Olivia Wilde thriller Don’t Worry Darling, which each take place in “idyllic” communities founded on sinister social engineering. Referring to someone as a “Stepford wife” has become a convenient shorthand for compliant women who puts the needs of men above their own desires and ambitions. (Amy Dunne in Gone Girl referred to such regressive types in her “Cool Girl” speech.)
As a cultural object, The Stepford Wives remains a fascinating barometer of a country still reacting to a women’s liberation movement that was redefining gender roles and upending conventional relationships. The village of Stepford is a symbol of patriarchal resistance, imagining what might happen if garden-variety misogyny were taken to the furthest extreme. What’s particularly potent about this fantasy is the idea of converting independent, cosmopolitan women into compliant housewives. It’s not enough for these men to want fantasy babes. They want to triumph over progress, too.
After breaking through as a young actor in two benchmarks of the late 60s, The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Katharine Ross was in her mid-30s when she was cast as Joanna Eberhart in The Stepford Wives, and she keys in on the restlessness of her character. Joanna is the mother of two small children and married to Walter (Peter Masterson), a bland but stable businessman who has cajoled her into leaving Manhattan for this village in Connecticut. She likes the city and wants to be a successful photographer, but the time on that dream is running out and she doesn’t seem to have the energy to fight Walter about fleeing to the space and tranquility of Connecticut.
Once in Stepford, however, Joanna soon becomes unnerved over the gussied-up women in frilly dresses who keep beautiful homes and have recommendations for great recipes and household products, but are otherwise empty domestic goddesses. She eventually finds another independent thinker in Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and the two attempt to start up a women’s group as a response to the Stepford Men’s Association, a secretive organization that has lured Walter as its latest recruit. A series of bizarre incidents lead Joanna and Bobbie to believe that something disturbing has happened to the other wives in Stepford, but they have to unravel the conspiracy before it unravels them.
Scripted by the white-hot screenwriter William Goldman, who won the Oscar for Butch Cassidy and would win again a year later with All the President’s Men, The Stepford Wives tries to function as a satirical Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but its British director, Bryan Forbes (Séance on a Wet Afternoon), doesn’t have the energy for it. The film is neither as chilling nor as funny as it intends to be, and only fitfully offers tantalizing glimpses of what might have been. Given the scope of the conspiracy – not to mention the immense creep factor – The Stepford Wives should crackle with paranoia and tension, but Forbes’s instinct is to underplay everything. Only the frisky, wisecracking Prentiss seems to understand the assignment.
Yet those standout moments are enough to account for why The Stepford Wives hasn’t faded away. The sequences where the Stepford women glitch are simultaneously hilarious and unsettling, like when one downplays a fender bender at the grocery store by repeating the same line on a loop (“This is all so silly”) and does so again at a party, when she tells the guests, “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe,” and it seems literally true. And though Joanna’s pursuit of the truth isn’t the white-knuckle affair Forbes wants it to be, her confrontation with her own facsimile is an unforgettable shock. Her doppelgänger is “perfect” for extracting her personality and soul, and just keeping her available body.
That no women were involved in any iteration of The Stepford Wives accounts for some of its problems, too. As much as the story is about what misogynists want from their partners – “I like to watch women doing little domestic chores,” says the leader of the Men’s Association – there’s a reason why feminists didn’t embrace the 1975 version and why recent films directed by women like Don’t Worry Darling and Barbie have used the Stepford influence to their own ends. After a half-century, The Stepford Wives continues to be a great conceit in perpetual need of a rewrite.
