Movie Review: The Stepford Wives (1975)

A suspense drama, The Stepford Wives is a grim parable about women's struggles in a male-dominated world, and a reasonably effective surreptitious thriller.

Aspiring photographer Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) reluctantly joins her lawyer husband Walter (Peter Masterson) in relocating away from noisy New York City to the quiet community of Stepford in suburban Connecticut. Walter quickly settles in and joins the shady Stepford Men's Association, but Joanna finds all the women of Stepford strangely demure, obsessed with the trivia of housework and uninterested in any intellectual pursuits. The only friend she makes is fellow new arrival Bobbie (Paula Prentiss).

With Walter spending more time with the men and exhibiting increasingly odd behaviour, Joanna and Bobbie try to drum-up interest among the other women in issues related to feminism and women's liberation, but the Stepford wives stubbornly adhere to 1950s stereotypical definitions of what a woman's role should be. An increasingly frustrated Joanna starts to worry that something is very wrong in the community, and that she may be under threat.

Directed by Bryan Forbes and based on the book by Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives does suffer from what appears to be a limited budget, with production values just a notch above made-for-television fare and a secondary cast hampered by inadequate talent and underwritten roles. Forbes is unable to inject anything resembling panache or tension into a story that is intended to be at least moderately unsettling.

It is left to Katharine Ross, in one of her better outings, and Paula Prentiss, happily vivacious, to brighten up proceedings, and they deliver all that is good about The Stepford Wives. Ross as Joanna perfectly captures the struggle of women to stand by their husbands despite growing misgivings, and she conveys the internal push and pull between self-fulfillment and adherence to established rules of domesticity. Bobbie in the hands of Prentiss is provided with fuller freedom to step into modernity, and she represents women less constrained by the past and ready to more fully participate in today's societal challenges.

As a drama, the film is a pessimistic view of gender relations and specifically what men desire from the women they theoretically love. Outside of the cosmopolitan city, the wealthy suburbs remain docile grounds where men govern, their meetings off-limits to women, and wives are subjugated into strictly defined household duties defined as cooking, cleaning and delivering sexual satisfaction to their husbands. They are not asked to think, participate or contribute in any other way. It is a static world divided along gender lines, utopian for the men and dystopian for the women, ironically enabled by the proliferation of technology supposed to improve human connectivity and interaction.

The suspense elements are less impressive. It takes a long time and plenty of repetitive hints, some as obvious as Joanna being asked to record thousands of dictionary words into a recorder, for her journey to reach its climax. Then the conspiracy is barely explained before she has to endure a confrontation with her fate. It is all passable entertainment, but beyond the concept, the film never threatens to deliver truly memorable moments.

The Stepford Wives became a catchphrase for women caught in an old fashioned time warp. Like the wives themselves, the film fulfills its role but is otherwise uninspired.

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Movie Review: The Parallax View (1974)

With the high-profile assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the previous dozen years, the attempt on the life of Governor George Wallace in 1972, corruption oozing out of the Nixon White House and deep mistrust of the government over the Vietnam War, conspiracy theories were mainstream in the early 1970s. The Parallax View is a botched attempt to confirm that, indeed, government-sponsored assassin teams are crawling all over the landscape killing people to serve some unstated but clearly evil purpose.

Newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is covering Independence Day celebrations at the Seattle Space Needle when Senator Charles Carroll is assassinated. A judicial commission concludes that the gunman acted alone. Three years later fellow reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) visits Frady and insists that her life is in danger: six other people who were also present at the Space Needle have since mysteriously died. Soon enough, Carter herself is dead.

Frady, a former alcoholic, starts to investigate despite the misgivings of his editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn), and travels to the small town of Salmontail, where a judge who witnessed the Carroll assassination supposedly drowned while fishing. After tangling with the local sheriff's department Frady uncovers evidence of something called The Parallax Corporation, seemingly a recruitment organization for assassins. As Frady delves further into the events surrounding the Carroll murders and Parallax, he becomes a target until he fakes his death and applies to Parallax himself under an assumed identity.

The Parallax View stumbles badly and early as any semblance of an intellectual approach is quickly ditched in favour of abject and random mayhem completely at odds with the film's premise. Supposedly surgically precise killing teams get sloppy in a hurry. Explosions become common: both a boat and an airplane are destroyed by messy bombs that don't seem to raise any interest from police authorities. A plot to murder Frady is hatched and clumsily bungled at a remote dam site. And The Parallax View suffers from reporter-becomes-superhero syndrome: Frady can out-punch a sheriff's deputy, drown the sheriff, tail a professional assassin all around town without being noticed, and survive three separate attempts on his life, almost comically reappearing unscathed at the office of his newspaper editor after every brush with death.

The film does not even begin to offer theories on what is motivating all the killing. A lot of screen time is invested working up the six other murders related to Senator Carroll's assassination, but no explanation is ever provided for any of the actual or attempted killings. This is a likely intentional underlining of the all-powerful-dark-forces-getting-away-with-anything premise, but it also smacks of lazy film-making: allow the bad guys to kill at their leisure without the burden of explaining themselves.

Amidst the dropping bodies and gaping plot holes, Warren Beatty meanders through the film attempting to act cool but appearing mostly disinterested. His lack of emotional reaction to all the violence comes across as a robotic detachment from the evil supposedly surrounding him, and combined with his remarkable survival skills make Joe Frady a character that can only exist on paper.

Director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis almost succeed in keeping the film interesting with some excellent framing, dynamic angles and some terrific camera placements, the scenes at the Seattle Space Needle, on-board the threatened airliner and at the auditorium where the film climaxes being particular highlights.

Conspiracies only work when less is known about them. The Parallax View attempts to keep the shrouds dark, dusty and menacing. Instead, it stumbles on cheap carpet and falls flat into the harsh light.

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