Why feminists would have panned this movie’s release in 1975 is a complete mystery, as The Stepford Wives is transparent second-wave propaganda. The film was adapted from the novel by Ira Levin, who also wrote Rosemary’s Baby. In the first half, especially, the plot line is subdued and cadenced well enough to develop a tangible feeling of suspense, but the overall message is a clumsy hammer incessantly pounding the collective head of the audience.

The film is one of many expressing the technophobic age of the 60s and 70s -- not the fear of technology in general, but the fear of technology in the wrong hands. In this case, the wrong hands belong to the Men’s Association of Stepford, Connecticut. In their quest for perfect wives, the men of Stepford have opted for robotic clones. Housework obsessive with a perpetual smile and continuous praise for their husbands’ ironically robotic performances in bed, a Stepford wife is a sort of GI-Jill for those Baby Boomer males who thought they’d outgrown movable action figures.

Were this boiled-down plot device left alone, the story would be palatable – even engaging. Unfortunately, it’s corroded with the over-vicitimization of Joanna Eberhart, played by Katharine Ross. Her husband is oppressive even before he makes the patriarchal decision to move the family to Stepford. Joanna rightly scolds him for making decisions before asking her opinion, only to mindlessly (selflessly) profess her love for him a few scenes later. She’s visibly depressed by her husband’s actions, but stays in the marriage just long enough to get herself killed. Their relationship is fictionally problematic, a woman with Eberhart’s self-esteem and competence would not behave as schizophrenically as this character must in order to move the plot forward.

Later in the film, what should be a comical scene – the attempt to raise the feminist consciousness of Stepford’s robotic wives – becomes pedantic with Eberhart both reluctantly and eagerly admitting to her smiling, vacant neighbors that sometimes marriage can hurt. It’s funny all right, but probably not in the way Levin or Forbes intended.

The message for women is threefold: 1) Men don’t schlep off to work each morning in a common struggle for their family’s share of the economic pie. Instead, men venture forth into the glamorous and powerful world of work to collude with other males in an attempt to control the world: to control their wives, their homes, their communities, their society, their economy, their culture and their image within all of that. 2) The woman who supports such behavior, who subjugates her personality and creativity by enslaving herself to housework is, in effect, killing her “real” self. (The robotic wife’s first duty is to murder the real wife.) 3) Technology in the hands of men (those warmongers and control freaks) is technology in the wrong hands. (Is there a male character in this movie who can be trusted? Wouldn’t this movie be even more frighteningly realistic if there were?) Only a child under the age of 9 could watch The Stepford Wives without feeling lectured.

If you can get past the heavy-handed message, Katharine Ross is a wonderful actress. And I liked the direction of Bryan Forbes, who imbued this horror/fantasy with that 70s realtime stream-of-actor-consciousness: 40-second reactions, a grounding in place by pulling background audio to the foreground, and a prudent refusal to enslave the film to dialogue. Technically, though, it’s a wash. The Stepford Wives was released on DVD in December of ’97, but you’d be better off watching it on VHS. The Amazon.com’s widescreen review points out that the soundtrack is Dolby Digital encoded in dual-channel mono, leaving the sound “strident, harsh, bright and distorted with low level hum and hiss.”

All in all, I still recommend this film if you haven’t seen it; The Stepford Wives is an important entry in the field of 70s political/pop cinema. But it’s not on my list of favorite rainy-day, fleece blanket, hot tea flicks, and I wouldn’t recommend it for a late-night, deep-thought craving, either.



Recommended: Yes