The Stepford Wives (film)

The 1975 film adaptation of The Stepford Wives is an unquestioned classic of horror/science fiction. It's a fairly faithful adaptation, perhaps not surprisingly since Ira Levin himself is credited, with William Goldman, with the screenplay. The director, Bryan Forbes, was British and came from a theatre as well as a film background; his astute sense of timing and story development are evident throughout. The cast, particularly Katharine Ross as Joanna and Paul Prentiss as Bobbie, are outstanding -- a vital aspect of a story that makes use of its point of view as an element of the overall suspense. Like the band of survivors in The Poseidon Adventure, the suspense is in who will fail next, and whether in fact anyone will succeed.

From the viewpoint of today, the feminist themes of both novel and film seem strong, perhaps even strident -- but back in 1975, leading feminists were not impressed. Betty Friedan walked out of the screening; Eleanor Perry -- screenwriter of Diary of a Mad Housewife -- stayed, but remained critical: "Men made this film, right?" Another writer, Linda Arking, was even more pointed: "I think it dumps on everyone -- women, men, suburbia.  It confirms every fear we've ever had about the battle of the sexes, and says that there is no way for people to get together and lead human lives." Looking back on this response, though, writer Bianca Garner is able to discern an underlying feminist message. The feminist British writer Jeanette Winterson aptly observed that while the original film was a drama, the 2004 remake played everything for comedy -- is this a sign of the changing times? More recently, the 2014 television series Secret Lives of the Stepford Wives tosses aside the animatronic idea altogether -- the perfection of these wives is "real," but each episode offers a peek of all the sludge that their good housekeeping has swept under the rug.

So I think all this highlights the fact that a book, a movie adaptation, and a series are all very different things -- and even just one of these is different as times, tastes, and audiences shift. We can't watch The Stepford Wives with the eyes of 1975, any more than we can read Poe's stories from the perspective of their original readers in the 1830's and 40's. And so, when a fresh adaptation of a novel is made, it tells us something about the perspective of its makers, and the time of its making. We'll see some of these same questions with our next book, The Handmaid's Tale -- a 1985 novel turned into a 1990 film, a 2017 television series, and a 2019 graphic novel. So what, to our eyes of today, does the 1975 film say? Your answers below.