Budding photographer Joanna (Katharine Ross) isn’t all that happy when husband Walter (Peter Masterson) decides to move the family from the city to the kind of pristine, picture-postcard town that seems pretty perfect to the man about the house but is mighty strange to his wife. When Walter joins the Stepford Men’s Association, Joanna and her liberated pal Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) try to start a women’s group but they discover that the local ladies are more interested in keeping house than eking out a level of equality with their spouse. Bobbie suspects that something in the water is turning these women into blinkered automatons…but whatever it is, no female seems safe from its insidious influence.

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The year 1972 was a watershed year for the emergence of women from the tyranny of repression. In the US, a female who was raped in jail by a warden is acquitted of his murder, thereby establishing a precedent for killing as self-defence against rape; Helen Reddy records the song I Am Woman, which becomes an unofficial anthem for the women’s lib movement; Ms magazine was published for the first time and Ira Levin writes his bestseller, The Stepford Wives, which is still seen today as the great gothic novel of the cause. In 1975, with the movement past its prime, the film version was splash released across America, made some money, and was swallowed up by the video shops where its cult following has grown and multiplied and transmuted onto DVD.

Undervalued at the time and panned by impatient critics as being rather slow and ponderous, the film has a hypnotic creepiness about it that is best appreciated by viewers who haven’t read the book and who might first mistake it as a tacky tale about wife-swapping in the leafier boroughs of Connecticut… where no-one locks their doors.

Something very strange is happening to the gorgeous women who have been uprooted from the bustle of big city life by their unprepossessing spouses and supplanted into Stepford where the sisterhood seems to have no other life than blissful subservience to the menfolk. While many of the husbands are preoccupied with the “secret men’s business” which keeps them out at night, the perfectly manicured Stepford wives fuss obsessively with their cooking, cleaning and keeping themselves nice. At a sunny pool party, Carol, one of the ditzier and more docile dames about town, has a little too much to drink and babbles on like a broken gramophone record about how “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe!” When Joanna and Bobbie try to generate interest in a local women’s group, only five turn up for a “consciousness raising session” but they are more intent in droning on about the merits of a nondescript ironing spray (“If time is your enemy, make friends with Easy On”) than seriously dealing with gender issues. Joanna and Bobbie look at each other as if they are the only flesh and blood creatures in a nest-full of zombies…which is closer to the truth than they realise.

Award-winning writer William Goldman adapted the novel and revealed in his own best-seller Adventures In The Screen Trade that the film was compromised from the start when British director Bryan Forbes insisted in casting his wife Nanette Newman as Carol. She was 40 years of age and didn’t have the legs or the figure to wear the revealing halters and mini-skirts that Goldman had envisaged and so the cast was decked out rather incongruously for the Connecticut summer in long flowing dresses and wide-brimmed hats.

A film that was supposed to be about the ultimate male chauvinist fantasy of obedient big-bosomed beauties, with sun-tanned legs and hour-glass figures, was trapped in a chastity-belt and the keeper had thrown away the key. Despite these constraints and Forbes’ rather pedestrian direction Katharine Ross (who was third in line after Tuesday Weld and Diane Keaton withdrew from the role) and Paula Prentiss manage to look suitably sexy, bothered and bewildered as the friends determined to shake the ladies from their lethargy. Prentiss is especially amusing as the wise-cracking broad who, when asked by one of the prissy wives as to which of two pink rose cuttings she prefers, replies flatly: “Well, neither one, actually.”

There’s something sinister happening in Stepford all right and there’s a teasing tension in the slow build-up to an electrifying scene in Bobbie’s kitchen, which Prentiss, somewhat changed from the free spirit we had come to know, pulls off with amazing aplomb. In line with Levin’s intent, the film effectively shows how conformity can kill character and how technology, without restraint, can cause catastrophic social upheaval.

In the end, Forbes allows things to drift on the wrong side of melodrama but this is a film that demands a second viewing to discover the clues to Stepford’s dark secrets that are dispersed like crumbs along the way…the naked mannequin; the ambulance taking the wrong route to hospital, and “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe.”

TITLE: STEPFORD WIVES, THE (1975): DVD

RATING: (PG)

ORIGIN: (US, 1975)

FOREIGN TITLE:

SECTION: DVD

CAST: Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson

DIRECTOR: Brian Forbes

SCRIPT: William Goldman

RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes

PRESENTATION: Widescreen 16:9 enhanced; Dolby Digital: Mono

SPECIAL FEATURES: Theatrical Trailer; interviews with Director Bryan Forbes, producer Edgar J. Scherick and stars of the film; radio spots; bios

DVD DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount

DVD RELEASE: August 5, 2004