The original film leaves it open just how much Walter knew about Stepford before he arrived, or how okay he was with the whole process. A line about Carol when they first arrives "I hope she cooks as good as she looks" could be just friendly banter or it could mean that he already knew. Given the scene where Joanna finds him drinking after a meeting, it's possible he didn't know the process involved murdering his wife to begin with. The book makes it a lot clearer that the men are recruited with the express purpose of replacing their wives, judging by Royal's placation of Ruthanne. The alternate interpretation still applies for the movie, though.
Charmaine alludes to only playing tennis with teenage boys who fancy her. Given how she's sure that Ed doesn't love her, is she having affairs with these underage boys on the side? Charmaine also claims to not enjoy or want sex, either with men or with women (which she knows because she has tried it), suggesting she may be asexual. And since she's more cynical about how her looks are her best attribute, does she only invite over the teenage boys because she wants company and she thinks they're the only ones who would come by?
Anvilicious: The social satire here is pretty blatant with the men replacing their liberated feminist wives with submissive domestic robots - but it served to show audiences that forcing women into these domestic roles is damaging and that the wives are people with their own hopes and ambitions too. There's a scene where Walter is in over his head trying to entertain the children, to which Joanna snarks that she spends lots of time and does multiple activities with them, and that he went to Columbia for 7 years and to use his brains.
Broken Base: The wives' outfits. In the original treatment, they were to be dressed "like Playboy bunnies, sans ears". When Nanette Newman was cast, the costumes instead became more like traditional 1950s housewives dresses. The original screenwriter disowned this, citing it unrealistic that men wanting to create sexbots wouldn't make them as sexy as possible. Others however feel that the 1950s dresses emphasise the Stay in the Kitchen satire more than the skimpy outfits would. The remake offers a compromise and puts the wives in flattering sun dresses.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Carol isn't in the film a lot, but her major scene involving the repeated "I'll just die if I don't get that recipe" is one of the most memorable parts of it.
In the film, the gallery director asks Joanna why she takes pictures. She answers, "I want to be remembered." Think about that once she's been replaced by a mindless double.
Joanna stabbing the duplicate of her beloved friend is this after Katherine Ross's daughter tried to stab her.
The scene where the wives discuss the merits of Easy Off like they're in a TV commercial is this, when it turns out Nanette Newman promoted the Procter and Gamble soap Fairy Liquid.
It Was His Sled: The Robotic Reveal of the original was the film's shocking surprise ending. Thirty years later, when the phrase "Stepford Wife" had entered the lexicon, the remake assumed audience familiarity with the concept and played it for laughs.
There are people rooting for the robot wives and their husbands.No, really. Innumerable fanfictions and fanart have been published using the concept, sites like DeviantArt having whole groups devoted to it, often featuring superheroines such as Wonder Woman and Supergirl on the premise of Powerful People Are Subs.
Even at the time of its release, the film received overwhelming backlash from the feminist movement, who missed the satire and assumed the movie was condoning the actions of the husbands. Director Bryan Forbes was even assaulted by an angry woman with an umbrella, who screamed that he was "anti-woman".
One-Scene Wonder: The therapist Joanna sees in the third act who decides to believe her theory, gives her useful advice and promises to help in any way she can. Sadly she's too late.
Sci Fi Ghetto: Due to the closely related 'horror ghetto', the story is rarely referred to as horror, and discussions usually focus on the satire. This seems to be changing as of the 2020s, with it being included in discussions about horror, especially as many modern films in the genre attempt to emulate it.
Signature Line: "I'll just die if I don't get this recipe". It helps that Carol says it multiple times in the scene.
Unintentional Period Piece: The story is the kind that could only exist in the 70s. Second Wave Feminism had come, and there was now a clash between women breaking from traditional gender roles and those who held more conservative views. The film was made right in the middle of the Divorce Revolution of the 70s - where the belief that an unhappy marriage was better for the kids than a divorce slowly died out. There were still people young enough to have been raised with the Stay in the Kitchen attitudes of the husbands, and a conservative town like Stepford would have been seen as a little old-fashioned but not as unusual as it would today. Notably the remake came along in 2004 when the idea of turning your wife into a robot would have been seen as funny rather than horrifying - and thus we got a Genre Shift into a comedy.
Charmaine being a trophy wife is harder to accept these days. By the time of the 80s and 90s, there were far more women in the work force, and Charmaine would have likely had a job before she married Ed. If the film is set at the same year it was released (1975) then Charmaine would have been the right age to have grown up in a conservative household - hence her status as a trophy wife.
Likewise the amount of clashes between Walter and Joanna's preferred choice of lifestyle makes it seem odd to younger viewers why they don't just get a divorce. Bobbie and Charmaine don't appear to be happy in their marriages either. Before 1969 couples had to come up with some form of wrongdoing in the marriage in order to legally justify a divorce, and doing the math with the children's ages would put the Eberharts' marriage as before the no-fault divorce bill was passednote Joanna has a line where she says "I've been entertaining them for seven years", which means the Eberharts have been married since at least 1968. And around the time the book was published, it was still thought better to stay together for the sake of the children even if the parents couldn't stand each other. It was over the next decade that this kind of thinking slowly gave way to more liberal views.
To a lesser extent, 2020s viewers may question why the men if they want a Trophy Wife don't just dump their established partner for a hot model, or sell the sexbots for int-0perested men and women without the pretense of marriage. But at the time, casual affairs, divorce or premarital sex were still seriously stigmatized among conservative circles; the robotic wives allows them to have their sex toys without any social baggage. Modern attitudes, though, make the men seem even more vile and petty, because they opted to Kill and Replace their wives one assumes they could previously at least tolerate for no reason other than misogyny and control issues.
The idea that moving to the suburbs to raise the children was inherently better is also fast dying out. The youth of the 2000s flock towards cities and urban settings, and the old romantic view of peaceful suburban life has been challenged in multiple works like American Beauty, Desperate Housewives, The Ice Storm etc.
The themes of conforming to traditional gender roles while also trying to be a good wife and mother - and examination of exactly what that involves - are still pretty resonant today.
It's been noted by many a critic that a film made in the 70s understands modern incel culture a lot better than contemporary movies attempting to comment on it such as Don't Worry Darling.
Vindicated by History: The film was only a modest success at the time, but it has grown in popularity over the years. 'Stepford Wife' has entered the lexicon as an expression, and it spawned several sequels, re-tellings and remakes. In fact, a significant portion of feminists condemned it upon release for being perceived as a response to the women's movement - and nowadays it's seen as a powerful feminist satire.
Charmaine is probably the biggest Woobie among the wives. Walter and Joanna seem to have some happy moments, and they've got children they both love. Bobbie and Dave too seem to have a somewhat happy marriage. Charmaine meanwhile is a trophy wife, is fully aware of it and appears to be the loneliest of the women. She's cynically aware that Ed never loved her and the only value she has to him are her looks. If she's the same age as her actress Tina Louise (41 at the time of filming) then she's bound to be anxious that her looks may start to fade soon.
Joanna herself becomes a huge one throughout the film. As soon as Bobbie is replaced with her robot duplicate, she begins to realise that she's next. She's subjected to Gaslighting from Walter and admits to her therapist that being insane would be the easier of the two possibilities - because the second is that her own husband will Kill and Replace her. She also can't just up and leave, because her children are unaccounted for.
The 2004 remake:
Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, there actually was a reality show about putting a married couple's relationship to the test by separating them on an island full of sexy people. And yes, it was on Fox.
Ass Pull: The 2004 remake ends with a twist: the wives simply have chips in their brains that are easily deactivated, rather than being robot doubles, so we can have a happy ending. This creates a large plot hole, as it contradicts a few scenes like one of the wives acting like an ATM and spewing dollar bills from her mouth, or the Camp Gay guy apparently looking at his robot double in horror. One deleted scene with Bette Midler's character going nuts with various housecleaning accessories in her body makes it very clear that they were originally intended to be robots. This could be due to the film's multiple reshoots.
The scene where the husbands use one of the wives as an ATM.
There's also the unstoppable twirling scene and the remote control breast size scene. These were actually meant to be rather blatant Foreshadowing, but were rendered bizarre because of the last minute change to the ending.
Designated Hero: The three protagonists are all jerks. Both Joanna and Bobbie are Straw Feminists, the former being a Corrupt Corporate Executive who created reality shows revolving around women domineering over the men in their lives, the latter of whom couldn't care less about her own family and treated them as an annoyance, even writing a book that tells women to cut their husbands' balls off as they sleep for absolutely no reason. Meanwhile, the Camp Gay Roger regularly went out of his way to embarrass his partner. It is easy to see why some were Rooting for the Empire. At least in the case of Joanna, prior to the move to Stepford, her being a Corrupt Corporate Executive is a bad thing and her straw misandrist shows are terrible. It is somewhat mitigated by Joanna's Character Development, that Bobbi's book title is more shock value than the actual content itself, and being embarrassing to his partner doesn't justify abuse.
Fans Prefer the New Her: Joanna's robot replacement was an Unnecessary Makeover in the original film, given that she was already quite good-looking beforehand. Here, though, the main women are much more dressed-down and therefore the change to conventional attractiveness after becoming robots is more striking. Many viewers prefer them like this, missing the whole point of what had been done to the women (and Roger). Indeed the climactic party scene has all the characters dressed stunningly, Joanna especially.
Funny Moments: As bizarre as the film is, it can easily get a few laughs.
Joanna and Bobbi's attempts to get a rise out of the book club culminate in Bobbi suggesting she make a giant penis out of pine cones for a Christmas decoration.
"I asked myself; 'Where would people never notice a town full of robots? *gasp* Connecticut!'"
The Take That! to Disneyland from the original now gets updated to also include Microsoft and AOL.
Joanna: Is that why the women are so slow?
Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: The 2004 version makes Joanna and Bobbie Adaptational Jerkasses and adds a new character Roger, who embarrasses his partner in public. As a result, viewers tend to see them as Asshole Victims, far more than the husbands of Stepford - who are brainwashing their wives into being passive domestics.
While a lot of critics slated the film for taking a comedic approach to the storyline rather than the more serious tone of the previous adaptation, the original novel actually was more comedic in tone than the 1975 film. In fact, that film was actually supposed to be as comedic as this one, but director Bryan Forbes rewrote it and eliminated most of the humor.
The twist of the wives merely being lobotomized, rather than murdered and replaced with lookalike robots, might have came from the sequel films, which also performed this retcon so that the victims could be saved in the end.
Rule of Sean Connery: Glenn Close is widely considered one of the best things about the movie, from her wildly entertaining Motive Rant towards the end, being funny without Chewing the Scenery and salvaging many of the film's weaker moments.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Roger is portrayed to be the fun and campy gay friend of both Joanna and Bobbie but he constantly goes out of his way to embarrass his partner and doesn’t seem to care about his feelings at all. It’s already established that Joanna and Bobbie are in Designated Hero territory but they had fairly solid relationships with their husbands. Roger, however, doesn't really seem to get along with his husband.
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