THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975)

Just as people speak easily of “Jekyll and Hyde” without having read the Robert Louis Stevenson novella or seen any of its adaptations, it’s a reasonable bet that the term “Stepford Wife” is better known today than Bryan Forbes’s 1975 film, let alone the 1972 novel by Ira Levin. Indeed, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the use of the term (in books) was pretty negligible until long after the film’s release, reaching its peak in 2013—perhaps because so-called “Stepford Wives” (women devoted to housework and obedience to their husbands), were by that point sufficiently rare to warrant their own slang. With this in mind, and because it’s difficult to say a great deal about the film otherwise, I won’t avoid spoilers here.

So: the climactic revelation of the film—spelt out more definitely than in the book—is that the wives of Stepford (and note they are “wives”, not “women”, just one of many ways in which both novel and film are more subtle than they look) are robots, manufactured by the men to resemble their former human wives and to act in a superficially human manner, but with no interest in anything beyond waiting on and flattering their husbands: in the kitchen, in bed, or anywhere else. This is the one thing about The Stepford Wives that everybody knows and, of course, it’s a pretty obvious metaphor for the way that the male-dominated society of the time shaped women to men’s needs. It’s also completely implausible, from a realistic point of view: never mind that the robotics required are beyond even today’s technology, the conspiracy—if limited to the small Connecticut town of Stepford—could not last long anyway. It would only take one man, invited to replace his wife but shocked by the proposition, to blow the whole thing apart.

But then The Stepford Wives isn’t attempting to be realistic on any level: all men are fundamentally like this, it’s saying, or at least tempted to be like this if given the opportunity; there are no “good men” who will save the day; if anyone’s going to do it, it has to be women themselves. None of this is spelled out explicitly in The Stepford Wives, and indeed for a film whose entire purpose is to make points about society, it never tips over into full-blown lecturing of the audience: when these ideas are discussed, it’s completely credible in the context of the drama, because of course feminism and misogyny were hot topics that real people quite often discussed at the time.

It also never loses its hold on audiences, despite being based on such a simple storyline. Joanna (Katharine Ross), her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and their two children move to Stepford; Joanna starts to suspect there is something wrong with the other women there; her suspicions prove grounded; she discovers that Walter has joined the men’s nefarious scheme. The end, pretty much. There are long passages where nothing dramatic happens. Yet the apparent peace of much of The Stepford Wives is deceptive—the small cast and limited settings make the film more claustrophobic than you notice at the time, the sense of peril builds in such a slow-burn way that like Joanna, viewers unfamiliar with where it’s all heading may not realise until it’s too late—and critics who find the film too slow-moving or insufficiently edgy seem to me to be missing the point.

For example, Scott Tobias argued in The Guardian recently that “The Stepford Wives should crackle with paranoia and tension” but doesn’t; and yet Joanna’s plight, surely, is precisely that she’s stranded in a place utterly lacking in paranoia and tension. The shots of idyllic strolls through long grass in the sunshine are patently ironic, as is the blissful music from Michael Small that accompanies many scenes of Stepford. The way that everybody in the town accepts the reduction of women to a servant role is itself the source of disquiet, much more than the comparatively few scenes of conflict, and it’s Joanna’s slow realisation that becoming a Stepford wife herself may be inevitable—rather than the briefly-depicted drama of fighting back against it—which builds the low-key but haunting sense of terror.

The Stepford Wives opens, however, in New York City with a shot of Joanna standing wistfully in the couple’s empty apartment, just before they move. As the family prepares to climb into their car, they spot a man on the other side of the street with a shop window mannequin in his arms. “I just saw a man carrying a naked lady!” cries one of the kids; “well, that’s why we’re moving to Stepford”, says Walter. It’s the first of many sly double meanings which might have been missed in 1975 by audiences oblivious to where the story was going but add a nice satirical touch for those in the know. Later, for example, one of the Stepford women comments “I can’t get my mind operating”. The sinister Dale Coba (Patrick O’Neal), head honcho of the Men’s Association which makes the robots, asks Walter if he’s having doubts about Stepford—on the surface an enquiry about the culture shock of moving from New York to the suburbs, but is he also checking that Walter isn’t having second thoughts about something else?

The sense of wrongness develops steadily after the family arrives in Stepford. The relationship between Joanna and Walter seems strong, despite some minor tensions (over him not consulting her sufficiently about the move, for example), but she’s puzzled by the complete lack of interest most of the town’s women show in anything other than wifely duties. One of them, Carol (Nanette Newman, real-life wife—presumably not robotic—of the director), behaves strangely after a minor accident in a supermarket car park; both Joanna and Walter are puzzled that the ambulance collecting her heads off in the opposite direction from the hospital.

Walter begins spending more time at the Men’s Association, whose building belongs decidedly to the Addams Family school of architecture (in fact the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in Norwalk, Connecticut was used both for Forbes’s film and the 2004 remake – all the exteriors were shot in real Connecticut towns) and which is inevitably seen during a heavy rainstorm at the film’s climax. Joanna, meanwhile, forms a friendship with Bobbie (Paula Prentiss)—one of the few local women of her generation with interests beyond home-making— and along with a third, Charmaine (Tina Louise), they attempt to enlist other wives in feminist consciousness-raising sessions, without success.

At first, though, Stepford seems just a bit strange, perhaps nothing more than a place that has attracted people with unusually old-fashioned views. But inexplicabilities mount up. It emerges that a thriving women’s group existed in the town until quite recently but was then disbanded. Joanna and Bobbie wonder if the women’s extreme placidity and passivity have an environmental cause (some chemicals in the water?). And, most significantly, the film tips decidedly toward horror when first Charmaine and then Bobby seemingly change overnight into Stepford wives, leaving Joanna wondering if she will be next.

Forbes tells it all in a very straightforward fashion, presumably recognising that complexity would only detract from the powerful concept; indeed, it couldn’t be more different from the other film by which he will most likely be remembered, King Rat (1965). That was full of creative camerawork, playing with objects and angles; in The Stepford Wives, apart from the occasional zoom you barely register that the camera is there at all. King Rat builds up its picture of prisoner-of-war life through multiple small storylines, while The Stepford Wives is devoted to a single thread: nearly everything taking up any notable time in the film concerns Joanna’s gradual discovery of the truth about Stepford, and nearly everything involves her. (Having said that, one key difference between the novel and film is a short scene in the latter where Walter and other Association men visit his and Joanna’s bedroom, confirming—though we won’t understand it until later—Walter’s full involvement in the plan to replace Joanna quite early on.)

In other words, the director here mostly stands back and lets the screenplay do its job. William Goldman—who had won an Academy Award for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and would soon pick up another for All the President’s Men (1976)—originally wrote it and received the credit but the director-writer partnership does not seem to have been a happy one, and Forbes rewrote parts, including the final supermarket scene that may be the film’s most famous, with the robotic wives gliding contentedly along the aisles. Forbes also departed from Goldman’s original concept of the wives as Playboy-style goddesses, instead making them slightly sexed-up versions of their human originals; a change that Goldman laid into in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, but one that works because it means the women are not too implausible, too soon.

Still, Goldman’s insistence that structure matters much more than “fine writing” in a screenplay is certainly illustrated by the careful construction of The Stepford Wives, and doubtless much of that is down to his contribution. Many individual scenes work very well too. Early on, for example, a meeting of a Men’s Association committee at Walter and Joanna’s house amusingly depicts the participants as fussy, petty little men, not at all the titans of masculinity they imagine. Later, the consciousness-raising meeting for the town’s women—where most end up discussing household products, rather than women’s lib – unfolds with perfect timing, even if it does hammer the point home a little. Toward the end, a scene where a desperate Joanna visits a seemingly sympathetic psychiatrist (Carol Rossen) is one of the film’s most intense, with Joanna’s fears finally being fully voiced. “If I’m wrong, I’m insane,” she says. “And if I’m right, it’s worse than if I’m wrong.”

Rossen, as the psychiatrist, gives one of the more striking performances in a film where most of the minor characters are only very lightly sketched in. A much more prominent figure throughout the film, and often underrated in discussion of it, is Masterson as Joanna’s husband. A lot happens to this character that is hinted at rather than stated outright, but is important for what it suggests. Walter is genuinely nice, if a little over-sexed, at the beginning, and Masterson acts that perfectly. He’s obviously shaken by his first meeting at the Men’s Association, presumably because he has learned what they really do; Joanna starts to think he’s changing; and only at the very end does he become aggressive and critical of her. It’s noticeable, too, that even then he’s seen reading a copy of The New Yorker, implying he might not have entirely left his liberal, metropolitan previous self behind (and underlining a city-versus-suburbia comparison which The Stepford Wives nods at several times, without making a big deal of it).

So, even pleasant, unremarkable-seeming men may have the makings of a chauvinist within them, but it takes something like the Men’s Association—metaphorically, a male-oriented society—to bring it out. It’s men collectively, not as individuals, who are the problem. If there is an individual bad guy it’s O’Neal’s Coba (cobra?), the patriarch of the Men’s Association (and possibly the originator of its plan), exuding polite menace from the moment he appears; he’s much the same in the novel, and perhaps for audiences or readers unfamiliar with the story, this might be effective misdirection. In reality, though the Men’s Association is pivotal to the plot, he as an individual is not.

Many of the women of Stepford are bland, but as with the unhurried pace, that’s the point. They’re robot slave dolls; so of course they’re bland. Pauline Kael, who didn’t like the film at all, commented rather absurdly that “robot people can be fun if they’re quick and jerky, while these spacey robots are a drag”. Yet “oppressed” and “brainwashed”—the metaphorical meaning of the robotisation here—do tend to go with “spacey”, rather than “quick and jerky”. She also opined on Ross’s Joanna that “there isn’t a hell of a lot of difference between her and the robot housewives right from the start”. That is a more reasonable criticism, but Ross (at the time relatively well-known after the success of Butch Cassidy and then 1967’s The Graduate) is convincing in the role, and again Kael seems to be wanting a different film.

It would radically alter the meaning of The Stepford Wives if Joanna were a kick-ass superwoman, as well as posing credibility problems (a man willing to replace his wife with a robot would not have married such a woman in the first place). She is certainly a modern woman, with a part-time independent career as a photographer, but also a realistic woman who takes care of the kids as well as being interested in feminism—the rhythm of housework and parenting in her own life is very visible in Levin’s novel, surely deliberately. She is not vulnerable to the Men’s Association because she is especially weak, she is just normal. There is not that much difference between her and the Stepford wives; women like her have only made some progress toward equality, and it is that limited progress which the men are determined to negate; this is the point.

Kael wasn’t the only woman who objected to The Stepford Wives, though many female critics did like it, and those who didn’t had varying reasons. Some considered it anti-women, a seemingly bizarre interpretation. Kael herself thought it absolved women of responsibility for their own lives by portraying them as merely men’s victims. Betty Friedan was infuriated by it, feeling that it exploited the feminist movement in which she was one of the most prominent thinkers and writers (and it’s fair to observe that The Stepford Wives was made almost entirely by men, although of course that was typical for the period). After a screening held by Columbia Pictures to develop interest in the film among female opinion-formers, one writer called Linda Arkin was quoted by The New York Times as saying: “It dumps on everyone—women, men, suburbia. It confirms every fear we’ve ever had about the battle of the sexes, and it says there is no way for people to get together and lead human lives.”

Indeed, while nobody could sensibly argue that The Stepford Wives takes the men’s side, the women (even the human ones) aren’t deeply sympathetic either; there’s a sense that they are more pawns in the writers’ sadistic satirical game than people we can truly empathise with. Forbes wrote in his autobiography that “perhaps what I do best is to inject emotion into my films”, but if so he either didn’t succeed or didn’t try so hard with The Stepford Wives; it has much more in common with Levin’s rather detached novels, several of which have been successfully filmed (A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys From Brazil). Indeed, though there are numerous minor differences, until the very end—which is much more ambiguous in the novel—the film sticks closely to what Levin wrote.

Mixed reviews were matched by disappointing box office. Goldman argued that The Stepford Wives would have fared better commercially if it had been released gradually and allowed to build up word-of-mouth, and what has happened in the last 50 years with “Stepford Wife” becoming a widely understood trope might support that. There have been four further films in the franchise, all of them with storylines drawing on the original, though not in all cases are robots used to oppress women. In Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), they were drugged instead; this made-for-TV film earned some modest praise but is as forgotten as the pair that followed, The Stepford Children (1987, with robot wives and robot teens), and The Stepford Husbands (1996, this time with men subjected to mind control).

A full-blown remake, again titled The Stepford Wives, came in 2004 but its more comedic approach earned even less enthusiastic reviews than the original. It has a few nice touches—Stepford is now a gated community, for example—and there’s some inspired casting (Matthew Broderick as a boyish Walter, Christopher Walken as Coba, and Bette Midler as Bobbie). But the extreme hamminess of the acting gets tiresome and it comes across more as an extended skit on The Stepford Wives than as a film in its own right. Where the 1975 film balances satire, thriller and horror very carefully, just managing to work on all three levels, this one is played purely for laughs.

More broadly, just as The Stepford Wives must owe something to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1954 novel and 1956 film), its influence can be seen in recent films like Get Out (2017) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022), not to mention countless movies and TV series about blandly attractive female robots—though often these are about A.I.s gaining a soul rather than a person losing one.

Another connection is interesting precisely because there cannot be an influence. The screenplay for Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), now widely familiar through the more recent HBO television version, was written before Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives was published, yet the two have such a similar premise: the men of Stepford have used robotics to turn their town into a private amusement park, just as the company Delos has populated its Westworld park with lifelike automatons. The android police of George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971) had already made an appearance (although Lucas was not well-known then so it would not have been widely seen), and so, of course, had more disembodied A.I.’s like HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Colossus in Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Perhaps that’s the secret of The Stepford Wives’ endurance. It speaks not only to a particular moment in the evolution of women in society, but also to bigger worries about technology, who controls it, and what that means for the rest of us. In so far as there is anything really scary in the film, it’s not the specific and far-fetched idea that a town’s women might be replaced by robots… but that any of us might be stripped of our humanity, or find that our neighbours have been. And if it can seem a flimsy, insubstantial film to those expecting that such a big idea will get a grander treatment, perhaps that too is a reason for its potency. Existential threats don’t have to look like monsters; they might look just like that friendly guy next door.

USA | 1975 | 115 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Bryan Forbes.
writer: William Goldman (based on the novel by Ira Levin).
starring: Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson, Nanette Newman, Tina Louise, Carol Rossen, William Prince & Patrick O’Neal.