!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY THE ENDING!!

The Stepford Wives is one of those films whose title has seeped effortlessly into the public conscience – the phrase has become a byword for a certain type of meek and complaint person (often a woman) even among those who haven’t seen the film or read the Ira Levin novel on which it was based (Levin had already written another tale of a woman at the mercy of a conspiracy in his 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, filmed by Roman Polanski). It’s a legacy which feels somewhat disproportionate to the film itself which boasts an intriguing idea that the film, with its troubled production history, never makes much capital with.

The basics of the story are, again, well known even among those unfamiliar with the film itself. Photographer Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) reluctantly agrees to leave New York City and move to the small Connecticut town of Stepford with her husband lawyer Walter (Peter Masterson) and their two young daughters. Joanna is disturbed by the women of the town, who all seem obsessed with housework and are totally compliant to their husband’s demands. The men of the town all belong to the local Men’s Association and Joanna is upset when she finds that Walter has joined their ranks. Strange things happen in the town that only fuel Joanna’s paranoia and her only friend, the outgoing and ebullient Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) soon changes into one of the dreary townswomen. She eventually learns that the men of Stepford are replacing their wives with do-as-they’re-told robots designed by former Disneyland animatronics designer Dale Coba (Patrick O’Neal) – and that the same fate is scheduled for her…

The Stepford Wives is an intriguing idea rather than a particularly good film. It’s too long, its would-be satire to unfocussed and it’s so full of plot holes that it’s hard to take it as seriously as it seems to take itself. Much of the blame for this might be laid at the door of the many problems the film suffered during production. Filming was delayed for a year due to scheduling problems and once filming got underway, the relationship between director Bryan Forbes and screenwriter William Goldman deteriorated catastrophically. Forbes insisted on casting his wife, Nanette Newman, who, though Goldman conceded was a fine actress, was older than the other actresses, meaning that Goldman’s vision of a town populated by men’s magazine type models (logical enough given what the men were trying to achieve) was compromised and the director constantly rewrote the script to Goldman’s dismay.

In his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman attempted to explain the reasoning behind his vision of what the eponymous wives should look like: “Look, this is a movie about insane men. Insane and so frightened of women, so panicked that their wives may begin to assert themselves, that they resort to murder. And if you are so insanely desperate, so obsessed with women being nothing but subordinate sex objects, if you are willing to spend the rest of your days humping a piece of plastic-well, shit, that plastic better goddam well be in the form of Bo Derek. You don’t commit murder and make a new creation to have it look like Nanette Newman.”

His words may be somewhat indelicate but the point he’s making is valid enough. Somewhere along the line, amid the miscasting and the multiple rewrites, the satirical edges of Levin’s novel were filed off and as a result the film lacks the punch it really needed to tell the story. It’s nicely made – Owen Roizman’s photography, bathing Stepford in daylight to complement the antiseptic whiteness of production designer’s Gene Callahan’s impeccably designed interiors was a very deliberate and effective choice by Forbes – but the effect is never quite as potent as it might have been.

Elsewhere Ross is too subdued and inert for her part of the story to play out successfully. It would have been far more interesting if we’d followed the more interesting Bobbie instead – Ross’ Joanna lacks spark and at times already seems fairly robotic even before the Stepford Men’s Association get their hands on her. The best performance comes from Prentice and when Bobbie does finally succumb and her replacement suffers a system crash after being stabbed by Joanna, it’s the film’s emotional highpoint.

The men’s experiment turns out to be counter-intuitive and can only be seen as a failure. In creating the “perfect” compliant women, they’ve removed from them any trace of personality and turned Stepford into a soulless, joyless and really pretty dull community, surely not what they could have had in mind? The satire, blunted by rewrites, should have explored this more surgically but it’s thrown away as a sort of barely developed afterthought.

Reaction from feminist writers and critics was mixed at best, some denouncing it as misogynistic, others hailing it a cutting expose of what men really want from women. The former seem to have missed the point that we’re not supposed to be siding with the men at all. They’re a pretty unpleasant bunch – unattractive, self-absorbed, scared to the very core of their being that the world around them and its sexual landscape was changing. The very banality of what they’re trying to do is neatly summed up near the end when Joanna finally confronts Coba, asking why he’s doing all this. “Because we can,” is the banal answer. “We found a way of doing it and it’s just perfect.” This comes in the film’s climax which is one of the best parts of the film. Joanna meeting her dead-eyed replacement which then joins their placid, soulless ranks of the women of Stepford remains one of the most memorable moments in the film.

But the fact remains that The Stepford Wives takes itself far too seriously. It’s an outrageously silly concept (Goldman wrote of Newman’s involvement, “she destroyed the reality of a story that was only precariously real to begin with) that Levin managed to pull off convincingly in the novel but which the film really struggles with. It’s hard to reconcile the robots with reality – it might have worked better had the women been brainwashed or even surgically altered. But the audience is asked to take a huge leap in accepting that the women have been replaced by robots (didn’t any of their non-Stepford families ever visit and notice that things weren’t right?) that are indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s a leap that the film makes it difficult to take.

But the film was a success. Its title passed into the popular lexicon and there were eventually belated and mostly worthless sequels, all made for television: Revenge of The Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987), and The Stepford Husbands (1996). In 2004 Frank Oz directed a remake starring Nicole Kidman that turned the whole thing into a farce, the satire diluted even further, and the resulting film was a deserved critical and commercial flop.