FANTASIA OBSCURA: Before “The Handmaid’s Tale” There Was This Man-Made Feminist Flick…
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, no matter how bad it may seem, you have to keep in mind that it can always be a lot worse than this…
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Bryan Forbes
The struggle for equality between the sexes has been, and continues to be, a continual cycle of promoting awareness to lead to advances.
Hopefully this will help us to get us to the point where women would no longer be denied agency or treated as lesser beings.
The struggle has had fits and starts over the years, but the 1970s were certainly a period when the message was received by more listeners than at other times, and progress with awareness felt more positive than it had in a while. The idea of keeping women in their place as home makers and “objects of desire” was certainly not as attractive as it had been even 10 years earlier, when films like The Ambushers would roll into theaters unopposed.
Which makes this film so interesting, in that in trying to aid the agenda, it was accused of setting it back…
Please note that there will be unavoidable spoilers herein.
We open during the credits with scenes of Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) doing one last sweep of her apartment on West End Avenue, checking to make sure that everything’s on the truck for her move to the suburbs. As she gets into the car, she spies and has to take a picture of a man carrying a naked female form mannequin around on the street:
Off she goes to Stepford, Connecticut, with her husband Walter (Peter Masterson) and her two children, Amy (Ronny Sullivan in her only role) and Kim (Mary Stuart Masterson, Peter’s daughter, in her first credited role). We discover over the course of the film that Walter has a tendency to act first before bringing Joanna in on the plan, and the move to the suburbs was no exception.
It’s a peeve that weighs on Joanna when she encounters and becomes fast friends with Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss) who bond over a combo of two things bad for you when not done in moderation:
As bad as things feel for the two of them, it becomes worse when they realize that there’s something… different about most of the women in Stepford. The way many of them are obsessed with trying to keep the house clean and their men “happy,” ifyouknowwhatImean, seems odd to Joanna and Bobbie. The only other woman in Stepford who’s not so obsessed is Charmaine Wimpiris (Tina Louise), who proves to be an exception compared to the other wives in town.
A comparison that becomes rather stark when Joanna manages to get a consciousness raising group together among the women, where the differences become hard to ignore…
The hackles get raised for Joanna, however, when Charmaine starts becoming more like the rest of the women, and her isolation grows further when Bobbie also becomes “one of them” too…
Ultimately, Joanna ultimately traces her troubles to the Stepford Men’s Association, an old boys club that all the husbands belong to, even her own. It’s there that she discovers the truth about the organization, led by Dale “Diz” Coba (Patrick O’Neill): How the men who join gain through membership the replacement of their wives with “fembots,” an ‘upgraded’ version of their spouses who will devote themselves fully to their husbands.
Something Joanna realizes far too late, as she soon meets her replacement…
Interestingly, the word “replacement” can be thrown about pretty freely in the production history of the film, as there were the issues of getting the right women to play Joanna and Bobbie. As director Forbes claimed he saw the two women’s interaction being reminiscent of that between Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern, he first floated around the idea of getting the leads from these two shows for the parts, which producer Edgar Scherick quickly shot down. Tuesday Weld and Jean Seberg were both offered the role of Joanna, but passed on it, and Diane Keaton originally said yes to the part, but changed her mind within 24 hours of agreeing after her analyst advised her against it.
Meanwhile, Joanna Cassidy was originally hired to play Bobbie. She lasted a week on the set before differences between her and Scherick led to her being fired. When Prentiss took the role, she’d only a few weeks before given birth to her son Ross.
Not that things went so smoothly behind the camera. Sherick deciding on Bryan Forbes as his director and getting William Goldman to do the screen adaptation showed all the sensitivity of bringing a copy of Playboy to a discussion about The Feminine Mystique, and went just about as well. Goldman hated Forbes’ efforts to rework the script, especially having to re-imagine how the “fembots” attired themselves when Forbes hired his wife, Nanette Newman, to play Stepford-ized Carol Van Sant; the script called for the converted women to dress in miniskirts, but because Newman could not pull off the look, Forbes came up with the “flowing-June-Cleaver” wholesome look for the wives. Goldman considered a script change to accommodate the director’s wife one of many slights that could not be brooked.
With a production history so tumultuous, it was inevitable that the film’s reception would likewise keep this vibe going. Columbia Pictures tried to build good word-of-mouth by holding screenings for feminists, a supposedly sympathetic audience, but the target groups reacted negatively. Betty Friedan herself called the film “a rip-off of the movement” before storming out without watching the end of the film, and at a later screening Forbes was attacked by a viewer with an umbrella, despite his pleas that the film was actually casting the men of Stepford as plotting villains.
In terms of plots, Scherick didn’t seem to have that strong a plan for the property he got the rights to. Based on a novel by Ira Levin from 1972, he may have thought that having gotten ahold of a book from the writer whose book Rosemary’s Baby became the basis for a great film, that he could just mount his production and be happy with the outcome.
The film’s lackluster reception from audiences – which was a great disappointment to the financial backers, who were of all people Bristol-Meyers Squibb – left Scherick with a property he’d keep coming back to, trying to get what he could for all its worth. The result was a march from tragedy to farce that included three separate made-for-TV “inspired by” knock-offs and a 2004 comedic remake directed by Frank Oz.
As for the original itself, it’s hard to sit through this film. It tries for a slow burn sense of dread to evoke the existential threat of being a woman in a town that literally objectifies you, but the temperature is barely a simmer thanks to the plotting and set-up. Michael Small’s low-key score could have tried just a little harder to service the mood, but deserts its post and leaves it to others to try.
And try they do try, as the actresses in the film take the materials handed them and make for some effective performances. Ross ended up being the right woman for the job, effectively establishing who she is as she fights to keep it from being taken away from her. Special attention to Prentiss, whose Bobby is so compelling to watch when she blasts onto the screen, and whose conversion through the program is so heartbreaking to witness. If it weren’t for the actors breathing life into the production, this might not have become the feminist parable that later generations would come to remember. Without the actors giving us people to root for, as opposed to symbols to identify with, then Friedan would have been correct in calling it a “rip-off.”
Do note though, that the movement being approached by the film is second-wave feminism, with the inherent weakness therein evident here too. There are only two non-white characters that show up, and only briefly in the last scene, and not a single person below upper-middle-class gets any screen time. It’s strongly suggested that when the consciousness raising group convenes, that no invitation was extended to Charmaine’s maid, Nettie (Dee Wallace in her first feature).
Nonetheless, it’s the ideas behind the film, so well realized by the actresses working with the materials, that made the film part of the conversation, when not the subject itself. Even as the movie slipped out of view, the general idea of a nefarious group out in the suburbs wanting to keep someone down certainly struck a chord with many who viewed the film. (Among them, Jordan Peele cited the influence of The Stepford Wives on his first feature, Get Out.) The term “Stepford wives” being used to describe women who abandoned progress and took a few steps backwards, and even the use of “Stepford” as an adjective for someone or something seeming to regress, stayed in the vocabulary for decades after the film.
For years, the general idea of something as insidious as the Stepford Men’s Association being out there, willing to hold women down and keep them as lesser beings, was the default nightmare to evoke when opponents to feminine progress would rise up…
…at least it was, until the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale…
NEXT TIME: Come for the Verne-mania, stay for the fire sale…
