Filmed in Connecticut in 1974, The Stepford Wives was released theatrically in February 1975. It grossed $4 million at the U.S. box office, though it received mixed reviews from critics. Reaction from feminist activists was also divided at the time of its release; Betty Friedan dismissed it as a "rip-off of the women's movement" and discouraged women from seeing it, though others such as Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry defended the film.
The Stepford Wives has grown in stature as a cult film over the years, and the term Stepford or Stepford wife has become a popular science fiction concept. Several sequels to the film were made, as well as a remake in 2004 that used the same title.
Plot
Joanna Eberhart, a young wife and aspiring photographer, moves with her husband Walter and their two daughters, Kim and Amy, from Manhattan to Stepford, Connecticut. She finds that the women in town all look flawless and are obsessed with housework, but lack intellectual interests. The men all belong to the exclusionary Men's Association, which Walter joins to Joanna's dismay. Joanna is also bewildered by her neighbor Carol Van Sant's sexual submissiveness to her husband Ted, and her odd, repetitive behavior after a minor car accident.
Joanna subsequently befriends Bobbie Markowe, with whom she finds common interests and shared ideas. Along with trophy wife Charmaine Wimperis, the three organize a women's liberation meeting, but the gathering is a failure when the other wives continually divert the discussion to cleaning products. Joanna is also unimpressed by the boorish Men's Association members, including the intimidating president Dale "Diz" Coba. Stealthily, the Men's Association collects information on Joanna including her picture, her voice, and other personal details. When Charmaine returns from a weekend trip with her husband as a devoted wife who has fired her maid and destroyed her tennis court, Joanna and Bobbie start investigating, with ever-increasing concern, the reason behind the submissive and bland behavior of the other wives. Their fear reaches its pinnacle when they discover that all the women were once strong, assertive, independent, and staunch advocates of liberal social policies. Bobbie speculates that industries in or nearby Stepford are contaminating the local water to make the women submissive, which is later disproven.
Bobbie and Joanna start house hunting in other towns. Later, Joanna wins a prestigious contract with a photo gallery. When she goes to tell Bobbie, Joanna is shocked to find that the former has abruptly become another clean conformist housewife with no intention of moving. She panics and visits a psychiatrist, to whom she voices her belief that the men in the town are in a conspiracy that involves altering the psyches of the women. The psychiatrist recommends that she leave town until she feels safe. After leaving the psychiatrist's office, Joanna returns home to pick up her children only to find that they are missing and Walter is evasive about their whereabouts. The two get in a physical scuffle when she refuses her husband's demands to lie down in her bed. Joanna locks herself in the bedroom, then sneaks out to Bobbie's house after Walter leaves her alone, but grows frustrated when Bobbie refuses to engage with her in a meaningful way. Desperate and disturbed, Joanna cuts her hand before stabbing Bobbie with a kitchen knife. Bobbie does not bleed, but instead malfunctions, revealing that the real Bobbie has been replaced by a robot.
Joanna later returns home and bludgeons Walter with a fire poker, demanding to know where their children were taken. He tells Joanna that the kids are at the Men's Association, after which Walter loses consciousness. Despite sensing that she will be the latest victim, Joanna sneaks into the mansion that houses the Men's Association, in hopes of finding her children. However, she is confronted by Dale, the operation's mastermind, who says that her children are really with Charmaine. He remotely locks the front door and asks her if she desires a flawless husband, explaining that the men of Stepford replace their wives "because they can", and that it is "perfect" for both the husband and the wife. He takes the poker away from her, at which point she screams and flees, eventually coming upon her own active but unfinished robot replica. Joanna is shocked into near-paralysis when she sees its black, empty eyes. The Joanna-replica smiles as it brandishes a nylon stocking and calmly approaches Joanna to strangle her as Dale looks on, confirming that the real wives have all been murdered.
Some time later, the android Joanna placidly peruses the local supermarket among the other glamorously dressed wives. As the wives make their way through the store, they each vacantly greet one another, while an African American couple argue with each other about their recent move to Stepford (it is implied that the wife will be the next target of the Men's Association conspiracy). Finally, Joanna and Bobbie greet each other, and it becomes clear that this is the Joanna robot replica. The camera then pans in on Joanna's eyes signifying that the robot now has the eyes of its original human counterpart.
During the end credits, photographs show a smiling Walter driving the family car and picking up his new "Stepford wife" from the supermarket with their children in the back seat as they become another "perfect" Stepford family.
Film scholar John Kenneth Muir interprets The Stepford Wives as "a film essay about what it means to be part of an unspoken 'underclass.'"[4]
Production
Development
Film rights to the novel were purchased by producer Edgar Scherick, who had a deal at Palomar Pictures. He hired William Goldman to write the script. Goldman said "I've always avoided doing movies that had many central, crucial female roles. But I don't think I write women very well. And when I read the Levin novel, I thought, 'Hey, I can make this play'... The reason I did it, besides liking the novel, was that I thought it was an opportunity for me to try and write two women that I could make real."[5]
Brian De Palma was initially going to direct, as Scherick had admired his film Sisters.[6] However the producer says Goldman threatened to leave the film if this happened.[7]
Goldman recalled "Stepford was a troubled production—we’d had difficulty finding a director. Preliminary casting had turned out to be a bitch."[8] Scherick recruited English director Bryan Forbes to direct the film.[9] Forbes later recalled "Scherick called me up and said, “Do you want to direct The Stepford Wives? I want an Englishman to do it, to get a new slant on it.”... I had a lot of fun doing it, and I never took it too seriously."[10] The director claimed Scherick later told him the producer offered Forbes the job because he admired Forbes' Seance on a Wet Afternoon.[11] Forbes said he saw the novel "as a savage put down of men".[12]
Clashes with Goldman
According to Goldman "Bryan rewrote all of Stepford, until the last twenty minutes of the film, which is mine. He would have rewritten that, too, but he didn't have any time. I'm not saying that it would have been better if it had been mine; but I'm saying it isn't mine, and I wanted my name off it, and they didn't take it off."[13] Forbes admitted to rewriting the film, but says he changed the ending from Goldman's version which Forbes claims was too horrific.[14] Bryan Forbes later wrote:
Between visits to his analyst, he [Goldman] was reluctant to change a single word of his adaptation, despite frequent urgings from Edgar Scherick and myself since we both felt it required improvement. Goldman has subsequently revealed his aversion to directors, especially directors who are also screenwriters and, in particular, British directors. He treated any script revisions from me as an affront to his dignity, for he had a monopoly of reverence for himself. With the first day of principal photography looming every closer without any real progress, we eventually came to an acrimonious parting of the ways. The final script that reached the screen was mine, and it differed greatly from Goldman’s.[15]
Forbes noted Goldman did not take his name off the script, suggesting it was because "that would have deprived him of his residuals."[16]
Tension between Goldman and Forbes was further exacerbated by conflicts over casting (see below).
Casting
Forbes later wrote that that casting was difficult, in part because he needed to get approval from the chief executive of Palomar. He claims he interviewed and considered twenty one different actresses and "cast the film several times, only to have my choices rejected by the front office."[17]
Forbes met with Diane Keaton to play the lead role of Joanna but says the morning after their meeting she turned down the part because her analyst did not like the script.[18] The part was then offered to Jean Seberg who declined.[9]Tuesday Weld initially accepted but cancelled a week before filming began.[12] Forbes later wrote "I obtained agreement for another star and had her costumed, only to be told that she had failed the medical examination and therefore could not be insured."[19] He did not reveal if this was Seberg, Weld or another actor. The lead role eventually went to Katharine Ross.[14][20]
Joanna Cassidy was cast as Joanna's friend and ally Bobbie[21] but was fired after two weeks of production - Forbes claims this was the producer's decision - and replaced by Paula Prentiss.[21][14] The movie would be Prentiss' sole hit from the 1970s.[22]
Tension developed between Forbes and screenwriter Goldman over the casting of Nanette Newman (Forbes's wife) as one of the wives. Goldman felt that the 40-year-old Newman's appearance did not match the young provocatively-dressed model-like women he'd scripted for. "She destroyed the reality of a story that was only precariously real to begin with," Goldman wrote.[23] However Goldman did not complain to the producer because "the last thing Edgar needed was a hysterical writer predicting Doomsday because a good actress was suggested to appear in the movie. Besides, being his wife meant security for Bryan, his family would be around, he wouldn’t be as much a stranger in a very strange land."[8] Forbes later took exception to Goldman's criticisms of his wife.[14]
Scheduling difficulties delayed the filming from 1973 until 1974.[24]
No exterior sets were built for the film, which was shot on location in several Connecticut towns. The climax was filmed at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in Norwalk.[25] Forbes purposefully chose white and bright colors, attempting to make a "thriller in sunlight". With the exception of the stormy night finale, it is almost over-saturated to emphasize bright lights and cheerful-looking settings.
Nanette Newman claimed Forbes had deliberately filmed the ending "in an unreal way, so they were almost like a ballet moving in and out, up and down the aisle."[26]
Actor Peter Masterson secretly called his friend Goldman for input on scenes. Goldman later claimed the film "could have been very strong, but it was rewritten and altered, and I don't think happily."[27] He added, "It was such an unpleasant experience."[13]
Release
The Stepford Wives premiered in the United States on January 22, 1975, in two cities,[28] before a nationwide release on February 12, 1975.[21] Goldman said the film " was probably released badly as far as the people involved in the making of that movie are concerned. It has some exploitable elements, but it wasn’t Halloween. The best way to release it would have been slowly, praying for favorable word of mouth. The studio threw it on the market in hundreds of theatres" because "right then Columbia needed cash flow badly—dollars, and now. Stepford got them some dollars. It was gone in a month, but it served the studio well."[29]
Box office
Premiere advertisement, 1975
The film grossed approximately $4 million in North America.[2][3]
Critical response
The Stepford Wives has a rating of 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 93 reviews. The site's consensus states: "The Stepford Wives's inherent satire is ill-served by Bryan Forbes' stately direction, but William Goldman's script excels as a damning critique of a misogynistic society."[30]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 54 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[31] Some critics deride its leisurely pace. Most applaud the "quiet, domestic" thrills the film delivers in the final third and earlier sections as "clever, witty, and delightfully offbeat".[32] As for the satire in the film, Roger Ebert wrote that the actresses "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."[33]
Jerry Oster of the New York Daily News awarded the film a middling two out of four stars, describing the screenplay as a "tedious" and "padded" adaptation of the source material.[34]
Variety summarized the film as "a quietly freaky suspense-horror story" and praised Ross's performance as "excellent and assured."[35] John Seymour of the Santa Maria Times also gave the film a favorable review, deeming it an "epic nightmare" boasting "gripping drama."[36]
Devan Coggan of Entertainment Weekly wrote that the finale was "deeply divisive" and the actress for Joanna stated retrospectively that if she was to revise the ending she would have Joanna "fight harder".[26]
Reaction from feminists
Feminist Betty Friedan deemed the film a "rip-off" of the women's movement
Initial reaction to the film by feminist groups was not favorable,[9] with one studio screening for feminist activists being met with "hisses, groans, and guffaws."[9] Cast and crew disagreed with the perceived anti-woman interpretations, with Newman recalling "Bryan [Forbes] always used to say, 'If anything, it's anti-men!'"[9] Despite Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique being a major influence on the original novel upon which the film was based, Friedan's response to the film was highly critical, calling it "a rip-off of the women's movement."[37] Friedan commented that women should boycott the film and attempt to diminish any publicity for it.[38]
Writer Gael Greene, however, lauded the film, commenting: "I loved it—those men were like a lot of men I've known in my life."[38] Feminist screenwriter Eleanor Perry came to the film's defense, stating that it "presses buttons that make you furious—the fact that all the Stepford men wanted were big breasts, big bottoms, a clean house, fresh-perked coffee and sex."[38]
Anchor Bay Entertainment issued The Stepford Wives on VHS on March 10, 1997;[41] they subsequently released a non-anamorphic DVD edition on December 3, 1997.[42] In 2001, Anchor Bay reissued the film in a "Silver Anniversary" edition, featuring an anamorphic transfer as well as bonus interviews with cast and crew.[43] In 2004, Paramount Home Entertainment re-released the "Silver Anniversary" edition, which featured the same bonus materials and screen menus.[43]
As of 2024[update], the film has not received a Blu-ray or online release, and remains under the ownership of pharmaceutical conglomerate Bristol Myers Squibb, who were stakeholders in its production company, Palomar Pictures, which went defunct after the film's release.[44] Several other Palomar-produced films, including The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Sleuth (also 1972), are also owned by the company.[44]
A line delivered by Paula Prentiss, as Bobbie Markowe, after becoming a Stepford Wife; "Yes.. this.. it's wonderful!", was legally sampled on the song, "Hey Music Lover", by British dance act, S-Express, becoming a big international hit in 1989.[47]
The film influenced the development of the character Bree Van de Kamp played by Marcia Cross in the successful series Desperate Housewives (2004–12). The character was often referred to as a "Stepford Wife" by other characters, due to her somewhat uptight personality, immaculately presented home, beautifully pruned red roses, and her love of baking cakes. She also dressed in a Midwestern, traditional style, echoing, but modernizing, the look of the original "Stepford Wives", as seen in the film.[citation needed]
Forbes later wrote "It remains a favourite film of mine and one that has stood the test of time. Indeed the title has become part of the language and I often hear people say ‘Oh, she’s a real Stepford wife’."[48]
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