Olivia Wilde’s recent “Don’t Worry Darling” reminded me of the iconic dystopia based on Ira Levin’s novel, and Bryan Forbes’ “Stepford Wives” caused considerable controversy in the mid-seventies. From today’s perspective, it’s a fairly benign film, and we follow the story of a family that decided to move from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan to the quiet town of Stepford, Connecticut. And while the photographer Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) is not thrilled with that decision, her husband Walter is still the one who makes all the decisions and moved this couple with their two daughters to a new, peaceful environment.
However, immediately after her arrival, Joanna will find this whole seemingly idyllic suburb where men work, while women are idle housewives, to say the least. All these women are happy to do their assigned household chores, they don’t ask their husbands what they do, and they wait for them to come home with open arms. They are not interested in anything other than that, and Stepford seems like a utopian community that seems to have been created in the wet dreams of the founders of the Vigilare association or some similar ultra-conservative organization. And not only are all these women obedient and submissive to their husbands, they are all beautiful, well-groomed and as if they are on a different wavelength than Joanna, who will find her only friend in her neighbor Bobbie Markowa, who is the only one who doesn’t act like she has a brain completely rinsed.
Of course, there must be something dark behind all of this, and Joanna will feel it on her skin very soon and will realize that Stepford is anything but an idyllic community. This subversive satire – a psychological thriller divided criticism in America, and it also caused stormy reactions in the American feminist movement at the time. It is interesting that Forbes’ first choice for the role of Joanna was Diane Keaton, who became famous a few years earlier with the role of Michael Corleone’s wife in “The Godfather”. The role was rejected by Jean Seberg and Tuesday Weld, and in the end it was accepted by Ross, who is probably best remembered as the unsuspecting bride of Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” and the girl of the Sundance Kid in the legendary western “Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid”.
Jordan Peele was notably one of the inspirations for the debut film “Get Out”, and later this cult film received several rather bad sequels, and thirty years later a remake was made with Nicole Kidman in the lead role. This film is conceptually interesting because we see the last tremors and the peak of the period of a kind of prosperity in America and in Western society when it was quite enough that only a man worked for an average and comfortable family life. The average American family of the middle class in America then quite correctly lived with only one salary, and this is one of the indicators of how much the standard has actually fallen in the last thirty, forty years.