Killing Me softly

In the brilliantly eerie poster art for the 1975 thriller The Stepford Wives, Katharine Ross' face lies on its side, shattered like a porcelain vase into flesh-colored shards. That unsettling image epitomizes the film's singular cult appeal with its combination of dime-store paperback aesthetics and shudder-inducing psychological implications.

In light of the current generation's political apathy, writer Paul Rudnick deemed that classic feminist horror film in need of a campy update. (The remake — starring Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler, and directed by Frank Oz of The Muppets Take Manhattan — opens June 11, but was not screened in time for CL critics to review.) That Rudnick's remake is a parody implies that the feminism-phobia of the original is old news; as yesterday as macrame and fern bars. One era's horror is the next generation's comedy.

What relevance, after all, could Bryan Forbes' chilling film of a bucolic Connecticut town populated with soulless domestic drones have for today's America?

Maybe more relevance than ever.

Surgery "reality" shows like "The Swan" feature housewives gladly turning themselves into porn bunnies to regain their husbands' flagging interests. Martha Stewart has made housewifery sexy again for career women anxious to reign in domestic chaos. And executives continue to trade in their old models for tighter, younger trophy wives. America circa 2004 seems to have converted Stepford horror into ho-hum complacency.

As a result, it is hard to beat the solemnity of the original Stepford Wives, which treats women's fears — taken to the extreme — with the due respect of the horror genre.

Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) is an artsy, opinionated city girl who, against her better judgment, agrees to leave Manhattan for the Connecticut suburb of Stepford with her lawyer husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), and their two young daughters.

But something is not quite right in Stepford, which has the production values of a real estate brochure and the casting of a porn film. The men are lumpish and ordinary, and the women are buxom, obedient sex machines with perfectly groomed, Village of the Damned children.

Joanna and one of the few remaining free spirits in Stepford, the tomboyish recent arrival Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), smell something rotten in Denmark. They begin to suspect the worst (a tranquilizer in the water supply?) when another new girl in town — saucy, provocative Charmaine Wimperis (Tina Louise) — straps on an eyelet pinafore and begins expressing an unholy enthusiasm for housework.

Scenes of the perfect wives of Stepford are lit like floor-wax commercials, with sunlight streaming into marigold yellow laundry rooms and bouncing off the white wicker. That TV generation cheerfulness works in sinister contrast to the film's affinity for gothic fiction. Stepford's haunted house is a sepulchral Victorian mansion, home to the mysterious Stepford Men's Association, which seems to play some role in turning spunky women's-libbers into glassy-eyed androids. And its Dr. Frankenstein is a former Disney employee, Diz (Patrick O'Neal), a swinging Esquire-reading bachelor who one can only assume is a misogynist so extreme he has no use for marriage, even to a Vargas robot.

With its morbid take on gender relations, Stepford seemed to define the hung-over, bummed-out realities of the 1970s. By the time the Me Decade rolled around, the free love and sexual emancipation that seemed like such a great idea in the '60s was beginning to look like an especially bad idea for women expected to play perpetual sex objects to overgrown boys' libidos.

Forbes' cult film captures the singular spirit of the age while offering a parable about soul-sucking suburbia with enough contemporary relevance to land "Stepford wife" a permanent place in the cultural lexicon.

The Stepford Wives author, Ira Levin, is a master of the conspiratorial bodysnatching thriller (often with feminist overtones) in novels as diverse as The Boys from Brazil and the 1967 gestation classic Rosemary's Baby, about a woman whose husband makes a secret pact with some Manhattan devil worshipers to let them incubate Satan's son in her belly.

Levin's novel was adapted to the screen by William Goldman, author of the creepy '70s novels Marathon Man and Magic. Both Levin and Goldman were unhappy with changes Forbes made to the script, especially in the final scene, which depicts Stepford housewives dressed in prim flowery gowns, white gloves and straw hats and slowly, gracefully pushing their carts down the aisles of the local grocery store. Goldman's original idea had been to present the post-bot women as Playboy bunny-types until Forbes cast his less-than-bimbette wife Nanette Newman in the film, thus dictating the ladies' more Town & Country-meets-Holly Hobby perfection.

But that cornball costuming is one of the film's creepiest effects. What those prissy gowns and robot expressions make clear is how desperately the men of Stepford long to turn back time. Stepford is a consummate sci-fi tale for showing how science without reason or morality is Frankenstein all over again.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com


The Stepford Wives (1975) is available for rental from Movies Worth Seeing, 1409 N. Highland Ave., 404-892-1802; and Videodrome, 617 N. Highland Ave., 404-885-1117.