THE STEPFORD WIVES 1975

Despite the fact that I was a pretty jumpy kid, I nevertheless LOVED to be scared at the movies. More to the point, I liked the idea of being scared. I had fun huddling in a dark movie house with my sisters, three shivering clumps of terror with knees drawn tight to our chins, peering timorously over fortress walls of raised sweaters. Unfortunately, I was also a very pensive and over-analytical kid with a habit of spoiling my own fun by taking what happened on the screen way too seriously.

The first time I recall doing this was back in 1968 when, at age 11, I broke into tears watching Rosemary's Baby. It was during the scene where the deathly pale and thin Rosemary, fearful that her child is dying inside of her, first feels it kick. In the middle of her cluttered apartment (she and her husband have just had a Christmas party), left alone by her guiltily skittish husband on the pretext of cleaning up, she sits rocking back and forth with her arms hugging her pathetically tiny belly. The look on Mia Farrow's face is so heartbreakingly happy that it just tore me up inside. Most people harbor memories of Rosemary's Baby as a fun, thrill ride of a scary movie (which it is), but I always remember how it struck me as being so sad.

Years later, I had a similar experience with another adaptation of an Ira Levin thriller, The Stepford Wives. Well-acted, suspenseful, and atmospherically creepy, I nevertheless left the theater feeling that the film was more poignantly sad than frightening.

"Daddy, I just saw a man carrying a naked lady."
"Well, that's why we're moving to Stepford."

The Stepford Wives is a feminist nightmare about a city family (Katharine Ross, Peter Masterson) moving into a suburban Connecticut town populated by dull, boorish men who all have stunningly beautiful wives who live for nothing more than slavish domesticity and sexual servility. The ingeniousness of the plot lies in its wry awareness that this women's nightmare is the waking fantasy of a great many men and a cornerstone of the American Dream itself. By pitting repressive traditional values against a more liberated definition of women's societal role, Ira Levin fashions a nifty modern horror story out of contemporary sexual politics.

Katharine Ross as Joanna Eberhart

Paula Prentiss as Bobbie Markowe

Tina Louise as Charmaine Wimpiris

Peter Masterson as Walter Eberhart

Patrick O'Neal as Dale "Dis" Coba

Nanette Newman as Carol Van Sant

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Films about losing one's identity (like Invasion of the Body Snatchers) only work when the film takes the time to develop the personalities of the protagonists in jeopardy. You can only be invested in the loss of something once the value of that thing is established. What I love about The Stepford Wives is how well it gets us to understand, identify with, and ultimately root for the flawed humanity of Katharine Ross' character.

From the film's first frames, we get a sense of her restless dissatisfaction and longing for something more meaningful beyond home and family. All the more tragic then that the very individuality she seeks to express is the one quality least valued in women in the town of Stepford.

Suburban Bliss: Dream House / Nightmare Life 

In Stepford, the wives don't even exist on mailboxes

PERFORMANCES
The casting of the principal ladies of Stepford is flawless. The women are all such distinct, lively, and interesting characters that you feel the men of Stepford have to be nuts (they are) to want to replace them with bland automatons. Tina Louise is surprisingly vibrant and even a little touching in her brief role.

Paula Prentiss, always a personal favorite, almost walks off with the entire film. But it's Katharine Ross' show, and she has never been shown off in a film to better effect. Hers is a deeply appealing, intelligent performance that is the genesis of the emotional impact of the unsettling dénouement.

Strange Things Afoot in Stepford

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I think it was a risky step for the filmmakers to have the women in Stepford speak to one another almost exclusively in TV commercial clichés. It's hilariously appropriate, of course (the women in those commercials seem to operate on another plane of existence — they all derive a little too much joy from getting a floor clean or a stain out of a shirt). But it runs the risk of diluting the effectiveness of both the horror and the suspense. Happily, the film strikes just the right tone and unearths the eerie subnormality that lies behind the pursuit of conventional perfection.

"We Stepford wives are busy, busy, busy!"

 THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As stated earlier, I enjoy being scared by movies, but that's another way of saying I like to be engaged by them. I want a movie to draw me into its reality.

The Stepford Wives achieves this by emphasizing character and relationships over plot machinations. It's wonderful how well the film works, even though we never really learn just how the men accomplish what they do (like the issue with the eyes). It's plenty scary just letting your imagination go where the film takes you. I think most good writers and directors will agree that detailed explanations and ensuring everything is highlighted and accounted for aren't always necessary if you can successfully suspend disbelief just long enough to keep an audience off-balance.
Much of The Stepford Wives wouldn't stand up to the microscopic scrutiny of today's fandom culture, but the film works splendidly because it's so well-constructed.

The Men's Association

Speaking of scary, I confess that once again, although the film has much to recommend in the way of shocks (the fireplace poker scene is so well edited I jump every time). But what always stays with me is the tragedy.

There's a scene late in the film where Ross (who longs for a career as a photographer) shows her work to a New York gallery owner. Her eagerness to please and desperation to be acknowledged are palpable.

Gallery owner - "What do you want from it all, do you know?"

Joanna  -"I want... somewhere, someday, someone to look at something and say, 'Hey, that reminds me of an Ingalls.' Ingalls was my maiden name. I guess I want to be remembered."

Oh, gosh. That scene just breaks my heart...and all of a sudden, I'm 11 years-old again.

"There'll be somebody with my name, and she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't take pictures and she won't be me.
She'll be like one of those robots in Disneyland."

 BONUS MATERIAL

A bit of twisted trivia: Katharine Ross' bathroom wallpaper, seen briefly in the opening sequence of The Stepford Wives (a horrid kind of mustard-colored jungle print with leopards and flowers), shows up 38 years later in the film Lovelace (2013).

Top: 1975. With good reason, as it turns out, Katharine Ross isn't looking forward to moving out of New York.

Below; 2013. In Lovelace, the biographical film about 70s porn star Linda Lovelace, Linda's parents (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) watch their daughter on The Phil Donahue Show. An event placing the scene in 1980.

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Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

HEDDA 1975

When I think of Brut men's cologne, I think of the '70s. Whenever I consider Brut cologne and the '70s, Burt Reynolds comes to mind. The Burt Reynolds of the '70s—complete with his porn-stache, tight pants, and swaggering, smirkily hirsute machismo—always seemed to me like someone who smelled of Brut.

I have no way of knowing whether Reynolds actually wore Brut, but it must have been the favorite fragrance of many men in the '70s because, for a brief time during that decade, Faberge Cosmetics (the makers of Brut) was doing well enough to get into the movie business. It makes me smile to think that such an overripe aftershave was responsible for one of my all-time favorite Glenda Jackson films: Hedda.

This big-screen adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 play Hedda Gabler is based on the 1975 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production and translation. Trevor Nunn directed both productions, and most of the theatrical cast has been retained for the film.

Being a fellow of a somewhat dreamy nature myself, I am drawn to narratives featuring protagonists whose lives are driven (and sometimes undone) by their idealism. Like Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Hedda Gabler is a romantic fantasist discontented with her life, yet plagued by fear of the risks--moral and societal--attendant to breaking free of the constraints of convention. 

Hedda, who believes herself to be a realist in all matters, would surely balk at being labeled a fantasist. Yet, it is precisely Hedda's failure to recognize her ideals (imagining her ex-lover "with vine leaves in his hair") and her failure to actively pursue a life with more options than those available to women in 1890s Norway that lies at the core of her restless dissatisfaction. 

The particular malady plaguing Hedda Gabler is referenced in the timeless lyrics of the theme song to TV's The Facts of Life (of all places): "When the world never seems to be living up to your dreams"  (bet you never thought you'd live to see The Facts of Life worked into an essay on Ibsen). Or perhaps it could be found in the disillusioned ennui of Peggy Lee's song "Is That All There Is?"  In either event, what's clear is that Hedda's romantic and heroic ideals contrast so sharply with her reality that she convinces herself that her happiness lies in the suppression of them. Yet they persist. Especially when they're rekindled by the reappearance of a figure from her past. 

The happy couple returns from their honeymoon 

The irony at the center of Hedda's situation is that the principal barrier to her happiness resides within herself. But by being reluctant to confront the true source of her dissatisfaction (her own cowardice), Hedda's self-resentment and repression of her desires (freedom) has no outlet but to express itself in increasingly embittered, manipulative, and harmful ways. It's a profound character flaw that leads to an irreversible betrayal and a profound personal tragedy. 

Glenda Jackson as Hedda Gabler

Peter Eyre as Hedda's ineffectual scholar husband, George Tesman

Patrick Stewart (with LOTS of hair) as old flame, Ejlert Lovborg

Jennie Linden (Jackson's Women in Love co-star) as rival, Thea Elvsted

Timothy West as the lascivious Judge Brack

The other tragedy within Hedda is that Hedda's "romantic idealism" is not romantic at all, at least not in the traditional sense ascribed to women. Hedda's ideals are almost masculine in nature, as they are a longing for independence, control of one's fate, and indulgence in a degree of sexual curiosity. Each of which she is rather terrified of flouting convention to pursue. What Hedda does have (made clear to us at the start of the film when we learn she is returning to a new home with her new husband after a prolonged honeymoon journey) is all that is assumed any woman could wish for: beauty, social standing, a loving husband, an opulent home, and possibly a child on the way. In short, the romantic ideal. The tragedy of Hedda's life is that all of this bores her to madness.

Hedda - desperately bored...again

Hedda's fruitless longing for the independence and power she doesn't possess often leaves her the resentful audience or seething observer of those who do. Bristling at the constraints of her life, she's like a pressure cooker. 

Hedda attempts to wedge herself between a rival and a former suitor

"For once in my life, I want to have power over somebody's fate."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Who among us hasn't, at one time or another, felt the frustration of living a life we perceive as growing increasingly short of options as we age? It's easy to feel trapped and imprisoned by the choices one's made if the propensity is to look outside of oneself, failing to recognize that change is possible only through introspection and a level of direct action (courage) necessary to enact change. Hedda dramatizes the fact that it is not usually external limitations that torment us, but rather the bars and prison walls we construct in our minds born of fear and selfishness.
Hedda is forever going on about how bored she is and how limited are her life's prospects; yet, by way of contrast, we observe that her friend & rival, the meek Thea Elvsted is, in turning her back on social convention and abandoning her concern for what others think of her (terrifyingly unimaginable to Hedda), infinitely braver (and freer) than Hedda could ever hope to be.

General Gabler's Pistols
Hedda's masculine longing for independence is phallically represented
by the firearms she must keep under lock and key

PERFORMANCES
I have always been crazy about Glenda Jackson. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to see Jackson in a Los Angeles theatrical production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. To my great shock and dismay, I thought she was rather awful in it. Admirably, I suppose, she took the character of Martha to a place less traditionally bellicose, and for me, it just seemed flat. Quite a shock, given that, in my opinion, few actresses are as electrifying onscreen. As Hedda Gabler, Jackson commands the screen like a champ and never relinquishes it for a second. 

Like the stars of yesterday (Davis, Hepburn, Crawford), Jackson makes you watch her and rewards your attention with a layered characterization that makes this oft-performed role seem wholly new and revelatory. Hers is a cunning performance of wit and subtlety that makes the deeply neurotic heroine both frightening and touching (and rather funny).
Jackson, already a two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress, received her fourth (and final) Oscar nomination for Hedda.  But of course, as Maggie Smith so hilariously pointed out in the 1977 comedy, California Suite, "...she's nominated every goddamned year!"

Hedda: "I think I'll burn your hair off after all!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I love how the film is shot in sumptuous gold-brown tones, which emphasize Hedda's image of herself as a creature trapped in a gilded cage. This theme is further promoted in the elaborate & constrictive women's clothing of the time and in the overtly ornate trappings of her smotheringly cluttered home. Scene after scene ends with Hedda clenching her fists or fairly trembling with rage as she fails to find any avenue of escape from a world intent on closing in around her.

Trapped

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
In the 1955 film, The Seven-Year Itch, there's a scene in which Marilyn Monroe, after having seen the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon, remarks that she felt sorry for the monster because, underneath it all, it just wanted to be loved. Well, I have a similar feeling about Hedda Gabler. There's no denying that in many ways, Gabler is very much a monster. Yet you can't help feeling a little sorry for her when, despite all of her schemes, she's unable to prevent her world from crumbling in around her, and, worst of all, having her worst fear - someone having power over her - realized.

Grotesque Charade

It's difficult not to feel the pain that lies behind Hedda's monstrous behavior because most of us know that there are few things more soul-killing than harboring a desire for something you're too afraid to pursue.

Past adaptations of Ibsen's classic have portrayed Hedda as a victim of her time. This Women's Lib-era adaptation was somewhat controversial in translating some of the dialog in a more comedic vein as well as depicting Hedda as a more active agent of her own destruction. This non-victim point of view has the benefit of bringing to the forefront the irony behind Hedda's endless machinations, as it emphasizes Hedda indeed possessing the power to be the catalyst for many events, most of them proving only to be tragic and at cross purpose with her objectives.

"I will be silent in future."

In addition to Hedda, a very fine film I wish more people could see, there appears to be an entire catalog of Glenda Jackson films that have yet to be released on DVD. Among them: The Incredible Sarah (1976), The Nelson Affair (1973), Robert Altman's H.E.A.L.T.H. (1980), The Triple Echo (1972), Stevie (1978)...oh, the list goes on. Talk about your tragedies!

*Update 2024 - As of this date, only The Incredible Sarah and HEALTH lack official DVD releases.

Glenda Jackson and Timothy West in a clip from "Hedda" (1975)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011