You won't be disappointed!

Better Late Then Never

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

You remember the existence of the Christian Right, the MRA, pro-lifers, the gender pay gap, the sexual harrassment scandals all over the world and the fact that no older actress ever gets to play the lead hottie like the boys do. Suddenly the film seems a lot more relevant in 2018 than we'd like to believe, doesn't it? Makes you wonder why anybody thought it needed parodying in 2004. Were we pretending women had equality, particularly in the industry the bulk of the scandals have come from?Creepiest line in the film? Walter's comment to Carol's husband: " She looks as good as she cooks, Ed" within hours of arriving in Stepford. Walter KNEW before he moved his wife there!

The movie is scary at the end. I would never watch the end again. Just too creepy. If you can stand it, you should watch the end at least once to catch the horror of the story.But I find the scenes where the wives suddenly start obeying their husbands generally funny. Of course in real life this would be a horror, as it is at the end. But there is something hilarious about people suddenly saying and doing things they would never do before. People just don't do that, at least under normal circumstances like living in an affluent suburb.I see a lesson in the film about human autonomy. Our freedom is about doing our own quirky things, even if they're stupid. As one reviewer mentioned, the Katharine Ross character is actually a rather annoying person in some ways. Her freedom isn't about being good, but about being herself. Of course her sometimes annoying character does not reduce in the least the evil of her creepy husband.

The Stepford Wives was a huge disappointment. I expected something much more riveting. Rosemary's Baby, also based on another Ira Levin book, was far better. This one dragged from start to finish. Even accomplished actors Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss couldn't rescue this slow motion movie. I'm not saying that this isn't an interesting period piece. Made in the early 1970's it shows the disquiet of young, educated women about marriage and becoming a domestic robot. Many women of the time expressed the need to avoid becoming kitchen queens, keeping a perfect house and being sexually attractive. Some of the dialogue makes this very clear in a humorous and mocking way. Some of the scenes of the women are quite pointed. For example, conversations about domestic cleaning solutions at a serious meeting where Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss try to encourage some awareness raising about the emptiness of their lives. The supermarket scene of the wives dressed like domestic sex goddesses was like fodder for the college crowd in 1975. It was genuinely funny. There is some over the top drama where Katharine Ross tries take a stand against the town's conspiracy to make all families into robotic commercial style icons of the advertising world. Clearly the movie had points to make but lacked coherence and was marred by an overlong and far fetched story that wouldn't connect with the audience then or now.

The first time I saw The Stepford Wives, it was on ABC, in, I think, the fall of 1975. Since then, I've seen TSW about a half dozen times, and I still am amazed at how unsettling this sci-fi/feminist Gothic can be. I don't think of myself as a feminist--the levels of anger and hostility are a turn-off--but I got the point of the movie. Stepford is a grown-ups' movie because it has the audacity to tell an uncomfortable story, one of possessiveness and mass-murder in a sleepy New England community. The futuristic technology in the movie was dated for a long while, but with the advent of that Scarlett Johansson robot in the news, the end scene in TSW seems eerily prescient. In my childhood, I expected the good guys--or in this case, the heroine--to win. I won't give anything away, but the ending of The Stepford Wives is easy to see coming as an almost senior-citizen, but as a high school senior, I was stunned at how the story ends.Some years ago I read the Ira Levin novel. There is a moment in the book that, if I had been a 17 year old, I would have found incomprehensible. The main character and her husband are drifting away from each other, and, one night, the husband starts masturbating in bed while his wife, who he thinks is asleep, is very much awake. She lays still with her back to him. He is crying while he's manipulating himself, and she's horrified but silent.Here is his wife, 6 inches away from him, but the distance could easily be 6 miles. They're no longer married. She's dead to him. Heavy stuff, dude.Johanna Eberhart's husband, Walter, holds a secret so monstrous, his wife's horror at his self-gratification would quickly vanish if she knew her fate.So, when I sat down to watch the movie again some 10 years ago, I was startled at how deeply disturbing the book was and how the movie almost gets it right. The cast is both acceptable and believable, and my only quibble is that, as things wrap up, The Stepford Wives starts to veer dangerously close to a clichéd mad slasher flick. And that's my only complaint. My favorite moment in the movie is when one of Katherine Ross' friends, I think it was Tina Louise, mocks suburban wifey-wifeness by sneering through cigarette smoke, "Personally, I'd rather not squeeze the goddamned Charmin." That line is my take-away from this well-made, unpleasant, and disturbing little horror flick.