I APPRECIATED comments by readers on a video review I posted of the 1975 movie “The Stepford Wives.” As readers pointed out, the reviewer failed to mention the major plot twist in the movie. I don’t think this failure affected his basic point. It appears to have truly been a movie that portrayed housewives as conformist robots, but he didn’t mention that the men in the movie killed the housewife characters and replaced them with real robots.

For another reason, however, I removed the video. A possibly blasphemous comment in the review couldn’t be edited out by me.

I’ll have to review this movie myself. The later 2004 version probably was not as influential as the 1975 version. Stay tuned. And thank you to alert readers. Their comments are below.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, feminists gave the movie mixed reviews:

Initial reaction to the film by feminist groups was not favorable,^[8] with one studio screening for feminist activists being met with “hisses, groans, and guffaws.”^[8] Cast and crew disagreed with the perceived anti-woman interpretations …, recalling “Bryan [Forbes] always used to say, ‘If anything, it’s anti-men!'”^[8] 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.”^[21] Friedan commented that women should boycott the film and attempt to diminish any publicity for it.^[22]

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.”^[22]

— Comments —

Janice writes:

I think that something important was left out by the poster of the youtube video on the film “Stepford Wives”, which I viewed from the link on your site.

I had seen this 45-year-old horror movie, start to finish, long ago. It was a corny and badly scripted movie, true, but it did feature, as its premise, an evil masculine reaction to (yes, wrong to sensible minds) feminist ideas. The women are foolishly and pridefully led by 60’s propaganda; but in the film, the Men’s Club of Stepford was literally involved in calculating the murders of the women in order to replace them with lifelike fakes who would be perfect substitutes pleasing in every way to the men. The final scene shows Joanna, who has caught on early to the terrible plot, being led by her husband to the place where her barely completed android lookalike strangles her to death.

I know nothing of the poster of the video or his philosophy, but for some reason he never mentioned the dialogue in the movie where some Mens’ Club members are connected with high tech Disney-type robotics and advanced knowledge of plastics. He made little or nothing of their murderous designs.

This film said to me that the false dream of perfection in a human mate was a dream of males as well as females. A nightmare all around, in any case. Perhaps the takeaway should be that perfection does not exist in any creature this side of Paradise.

Laura writes:

Thanks for writing. That’s interesting. He definitely should have mentioned how it ended.

But doesn’t that part of the plot — I have to admit I have never seen it in full — fit in with the general theme of demonization of men? It’s kind of a perfect feminist fantasy.

Pan Dora writes:

Wow, we are talking about a member of a serial-killing cult, and he’s worried that she hit him with a fire poker. Boo-hoo. I wish she’d kept hitting till he was dead. In all seriousness, the problem with this film is it should not have been moved from the book to the big screen.

Laura writes:

But it was — and people are still watching it, so it’s worth analyzing.

Zeno writes:

I watched the video review, which was interesting. I had previously watched the full movie, but it was a few years ago, so I don’t remember it all. But I think the film is really more intended as  social satire than pure horror. Well, I am not sure how seriously you are supposed to take the ending that the women are being killed and substituted by robots.

I think the point of the movie is very simple, almost pedestrian. It’s saying that those happy, obedient, conservative suburban wives are all robot-like. It’s making fun of them. They are not independent, “empowered”, educated, artistic or career-driven women like the protagonist (I think the term “empowered” was still not used in the 70s, but the idea is the same). Also it is saying that men are afraid of independent women, and the only way they can get those women is by transforming them into robots.

But the film has a major plot hole, which is this: if the men (in 1975!) had the technology to create those amazing life-like robots, then why did they have to kill their women at all? Couldn’t they just create the female robots from scratch and live happily with them, without bothering anyone? Unless they were using their brains or some part of their bodies in the process, but the film just implies that they merely replace the women with identical artificial replicas, so it is not clear why they need the real women at all.

Laura writes:

People use the term “Stepford Wives” to mean shallow, conformist housewives.

Jim writes:

I wanted to mention that I felt like the guy commenting on the Stepford Wives movie was way off the mark, and it made me think that perhaps you personally had never actually seen the movie, because of your comment that he had made some “excellent analysis.”

He seems to ignore the fact that in the movie, the “changed” women are not actually human any longer, the actual wives have been evidently murdered, and replaced with exact replica robots whose behavior has been predetermined by the leader of the Stepford Men’s Association. So although their behavior is in our eyes commendable, and the virtues that this Black Pill guy applauds are desirable qualities, he never mentions that the real former wives of these men have been murdered, in exchange for beautiful, ageless, “goddesses” as he calls them, who haven’t developed these personalities out of a Christian upbringing in “the nurture and admonition of the Lord”, but solely through the mind of one horrific man who, if he was willing to murder women to obtain this result, would obviously not program these women to be such as yourself Laura, tenacious truth seekers. And so, these robotic women would be very flawed in their characters, something that is not at all touched on in this guy’s presentation.

Jan. 16, 2020

Laura writes:

The review by Devon Stack discussed in this post was recommended by a site I normally trust, but it was not faithful to the movie. I watched the movie in full yesterday and I would not say, as I did in the previous entry, that it is “excellent analysis.”

For one, Stack exaggerated and caricatured the feminism of the main housewife character, Joanna, played by the actress Katherine Ross. She really isn’t stridently feminist. In fact, she seems to be a good wife and mother (except for the extremely immodest way she dresses) who also has an interest in photography. Yes, she goes overboard with wanting to be famous, but she seems idealistic rather than aggressively ambitious or vain. She clearly cares about her two children. We see her comforting one of her daughters in one scene and later frantically looking for them.

The reviewer doesn’t mention that her husband, played by Peter Masterson, has mistreated Joanna by not including her in important decisions, including his decision to move to Stepford in the first place. Despite this, she is kind and forgiving. He is in general more materialistic and un-likable than she is. From the beginning, the men in the club are secretive, soulless and obviously up to no good.

Stack also misrepresents the other housewives. These are not simply well-adjusted, contented housewives, as the reviewer says, but are pretty zombies who bake and iron. They wear fantastic clothes and are beautiful, but are artificial and stupid.

As everyone knows here (so I don’t have to worry about spoiling it), the men’s club is killing the women and replacing them with robots. It’s a horror movie. It suggests that men who sell their souls turn their wives into fakes or zombies. There is some truth to that message. The Stepford Wives are all those people, both men and women, who care for nothing beyond material existence. They could as easily be career women as housewives. It’s not really a feminist message so much as it is a critique of materialism, the kind of attack against white suburbia that has been popular in Hollywood for many years, and, with the robots, a warning of dystopian technology. Now that robots are actually on the market, it is prescient in that latter theme. But the movie doesn’t really say much about marriage or the conflicts of being a housewife. Okay, everybody wants a perfect spouse, but the lengths the men go to in this movie to get one are just too implausible.

Joanna, and to a lesser degree, her friend Bobbie, even though they brag about their decadent pasts, come across as relatively normal and even heroic in their efforts to start a “consciousness-raising group.” The discontent that Joanna expresses is just ordinary dissatisfaction, not angry ideology — and it is a reaction to the robot-like wives, not real women. When the group finally meets, she wants to talk about how her husband seems to care more about his work than her, not about how oppressed she is as a housewife. (Stack nicely picked up on the ugly slur against the Germans when one of the still-normal housewives refers to her German maid as “born to serve.”)

But, all in all, I can’t recommend the movie. I removed the review from the original post because of some language problems. The blasphemies in the movie are even worse and the immodesty is extreme. (Do you notice how many blasphemies come out of Jewish-run Hollywood, with all the “Jesus Christ’s” and “God-damn-its?”) The acting in this movie is very good, especially by Ross; Paula Prentiss (Bobbie); and Patrick O’Neal, who plays the evil mastermind behind the men’s club. But, it’s a creepy and unsettling film with a heavy emphasis on Katherine Ross’s body and beautiful suburban houses. It invites you to ogle at suburban luxuries while hating them as frauds at the same time.

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