Bryan Forbes
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Pop culture reflects the infatuation: The Stepford Wives, Her, Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049 – and now Companion…
The Stepford Wives, a cult classic about robotic women under men’s control, came out around this same time of winter 50 years ago. Companion pays homage to that film’s iconic images of housewives in a supermarket.
…this plays like a contemporary twist on “The Stepford Wives” (1975) and even opens with the protagonist pushing a shopping cart (the signature image of both the original film and the wonky, guilty pleasure 2004 remake).
…slipping in some knowingly appropriate film references (Ex-Machina, Stepford Wives, Westworld)…
It's trying to be a little bit of The Stepford Wives, Don't Worry Darling, and even M3GAN, all of which execute on their themes better than Companion.
…that opening scene is obviously meant to evoke The Stepford Wives…
The original 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives, itself based on the novel by Ira Levin, starred Paula Prentiss and Katherine Ross and was a dark, genuinely creepy horror flick with a relevant point to make about men’s fear of feminism.
A wholly uninspired and shoddily constructed remake of the 1975 original, this version of The Stepford Wives is a big budget affair replete with a great cast that’s forced to flounder with poor material that only works once in a great while; the material itself isn’t helped by a lead performance by Nicole Kidman that is all shrill, all the time; a one note performance if I ever saw one.
Nicole Kidman stars as a New York TV executive who retreats to an idyllic Connecticut community in the comedic remake of "The Stepford Wives."
Now, nearly 30 years later, director Frank Oz and scripter Paul Rudnick update novelist Ira Levin’s darkly satiric work and give it, and the term, a happy face in “The Stepford Wives.”
Don't Worry Darling (2022)
Directed by Olivia Wilde
influenced by The Stepford Wives (1975)
Plot Themes
People may think that the amalgamation of ideas and ripped-off concepts from films and their respective directors (primarily Bryan Forbes’ “The Stepford Wives,” which Jordan Peele borrowed elements of for his directorial debut, “Get Out”) might be the problem that breaks the entire film into multiple pieces.
If you’re looking for a clever, insightful, modern twist on The Stepford Wives (1975), you would be much better served by WandaVision (2021) or Get Out (2017) than Olivia Wilde’s beacon of mediocrity, Don’t Worry Darling.
Following up her 2019 directorial debut, Booksmart, with what ostensibly looks like a remake of The Stepford Wives (1975), would be a huge gamble, were Olivia Wilde not up to the challenge.
Ironically, that same year the Bryan Forbes (The Angry Silence) directed film, The Stepford Wives made its way into movie theaters.
Por um lado, é a reprodução de “The Stepford Wives” de Bryan Forbes (1975) mais uma vez, a reutilização do modelo de quotidiano americano dos anos 50, onde os conservadorismos patriarcais de mão dada com o capitalismo serviam como resposta agressiva aos movimentos sufragistas que por aí se manifestavam.
It’s a decent peg for social satire of course - The Stepford Wives (1975) and The Truman Show (1998) both put their protagonists into similarly ersatz idylls to rage against the consumerism eating away at modern life.
Genre films such as The Stepford Wives (1975), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Pleasantville (1998) have memorably employed outlandish concepts to skewer the Western world’s vast wasteland of two-car garages and landscaped cul-de-sacs .
For such an American film, there are also clear echoes of British classics such as Great Expectations and Whistle Down the Wind .
Mud clearly sets out from frame one to run along well-worn tracks – it’s like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn meets Whistle down the Wind (1961).
Mud is something of an update of the 1961 British film Whistle Down the Wind (directed by Bryan Forbes from a 1959 novel by Mary Hayley Bell) where three children mistake a hidden fugitive for Jesus Christ.
Emily Beecham’s Alice channels Mia Farrow’s seminal Rosemary’s Baby performance, with shades of Katharine Ross in The Stepford Wives , a more than capable woman undermined at every turn where she potentially challenges her proscribed roles as a mother or co-worker.
Key film references this time round include John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing and Bryan Forbes’ 1975 film The Stepford Wives .
While the title sequence tune by composer John Ottman is an obvious homage to the lilting lullaby that opens Rosemary's Baby, the scenes establishing David and Emily's escape into the country are straight ports from Bryan Forbes' The Stepford Wives.
By merging the cathartic with the cerebral the films can take on consumerism with zombies rampaging a shopping mall, or archaic gender norms in the likes of Bryan Forbes’ 1975 classic The Stepford Wives.
Instead, this cleverly crafted chiller, written and directed by Jordan Peele (of the Key and Peele comedy duo), is open about its debt to “The Stepford Wives,” even giving its protagonist the same career as that pursued by Katharine Ross in the 1975 film.
Yet, when Chris arrives at the Armitages’ enormous house, there are small signs that something isn’t quite right (the film’s debt to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and 1975’s The Stepford Wives, both of which were second wave feminism-era films about women gradually recognizing their entrapment by the ruthless and conniving men around them, is strong).
It’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) meets “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) and “The Stepford Wives” (1975), featuring the interracial social graces of Sidney Poitier, the slow-burn covens of Roman Polanski, and the suburban chills of Katharine Ross in trophy-wife Connecticut.
Get Out is apparently an ode to an older generation of cinema such as The Stepford Wives (1975) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967).
That film – an unimaginable concoction of “The Stepford Wives” (1975), “Frankenstein” (1931), “Roots” (1977), and more – earned four Academy Award nominations, including Jordan winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
I couldn’t get past the various similarities that its narrative had with Bryan Forbes’ “The Stepford Wives” (which I personally think is a better film).
It’s simply played too flatly, and it certainly pales in comparison to, say, Bryan Forbes’ much darker The Wrong Box (1966) with its coffin mix-ups and venal undertakers, who try to palm off a 3-foot box (“Get the flag, they’ll never notice”) as the remains of a loved one.
(Perhaps in homage to the funnier The Wrong Box, undertakers first bring...the wrong box.)
The Housemaid (2025)
Directed by Paul Feig
influenced by The Stepford Wives (1975)
Themes Characters
…with a dash of The Stepford Wives’ satirical zip…
Seyfried gives some welcome manic energy as Nina, shrieking around her pristine home, part Mommie Dearest, part Stepford Wife.
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
influenced by The Stepford Wives (1975)
Today those times may have well and truly passed, but there is something of a seventies revival going on, filling our screens with ‘reimaginings’ of seventies gems like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Dawn of the Dead , The Toolbox Murders , The Stepford Wives , and now Assault on Precinct 13 (or AP13, to give the remake its snappier, oh-so-Noughties title) – except that John Carpenter’s original low-budget siege flick from 1976 was itself a reimagining of Howard Hawks’ 1959 western Rio Bravo, and owed a considerable debt along the way to George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), making it a story that really has been told many times before.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Directed by Joel Coen
influenced by The Wrong Box (1966)
Characters
Nelson, Neeson, Waits and Kazan stand out in the ensemble, but among the others Ross is hilarious as a codger as addicted to the sound of his own voice as the pedant Joseph Finsbury played by Ralph Richardson was in “The Wrong Box,” and at the other end of the spectrum Melling, with his wistful blue eyes, exudes an authentically tragic dimension as the totally dependent Artist.
Without spoiling too much, “Cuckoo” feels like “The Stepford Wives” (1975) meets a demented episode of “Nature” involving cryptids.
Films like The Stepford Wives (1975) then, serve as furious feminist rejoinders, offering a disdainful view of the subtext that animates these perennially subjugated, gussied up Brides of Frankenstein.
Humans falling in love with hard drives isn’t exactly new, from the shaggy hipster melancholy of Her (2013) to the insidious misogynistic desires of The Stepford Wives (1975) we’ve seen plenty interpretations of how men fantasize about a relationship with mechanical facades.
Much of The Wretched seems to be a missed opportunity, given how its scenario and lead teen John-Paul Howard suggest the potential inverse of The Stepford Wives (1975).
He tells his psychiatrist (played by Katharine Ross of "The Stepford Wives") about his strange visions, and she prescribes more drugs.
…misogyny (The Stepford Wives)…