'Stepford '-cupcake women m
The Stepford Wives, is an unconvincing,
ridiculous horror-supernatural-science
fiction-thriller (choose one) about a group of
husbands in a nauseatingly antiseptic New
England town who have a sinister habit of
turning their wives into ultra-beautiful and
bosomed domestic house kittens. The trick is
that the wives apparently love it; pittering about
their neat little kitchens, looking like meek,
condescending beauty queens and saying
charmingly drab things such as, "I'll die if I don't
get this recipe" arid, "I just love my brownies."
The movie comes from a story by Ira Levin,
the man who wrote Rosemary's Baby. Both are
stories of overnight persecuted women pushed
greg lukow
ky grip
to the end of their ropes by seemingly
supernatural forces. But if Roman Polanski
turned Rosemary into a scarey, campy thriller (a
movie preceding and superior to the style of the
Exorcist), Stepford Wives' director Bryan Forbes
and screenwriter William Goldman have
produced a boring, nonsensical zero.
Katherine Ross is our heroine-victim, playing
a young New York photographer who moves to
Stepford with her husband (Peter Masterson) and
children. It takes her very little time and only a
few disbelieving experiences with her neighboring
hausfraus to realize that things are amiss. It's not
much of a comeback role for Ross, who's been
out of the commercial movie picture for some
time now-sheved into the rear along with Ali
McGraw and others who looked like hot
property back in their Graduate and Love Story
days. The best thing in the movie turns out to be
a properly kinky performance by Paula Prentiss
as Ross' effusive, free-spirited best friend. When
Prentiss suddenly undergoes, her premature
change in life, Ross is convinced of her own,
fast-approaching fate.
From there the movie rushes headlong to its
climax (after the previous ho-hum hour and a
half) as a half-crazed Ross rushes out into the
night with iron poker in hand. The mysterious
source to this challenge to her womanhood, she
believes, lies hidden in the creaking hallways of
the town's Men's Association building. The
whole mess is proof that old gothfi mansions,
pouring rainstorms and thunder and lightning do
not a good horror story make.
The Stepford Wives is entirely forgettable I
don't even remember any of the main characters'
names yet if the movie wasn't so dull it would
almost be insulting. Just when women have been
inching their way back into the popular culture
of the movies, we get this silly, demeaning story
of men who would rather have these mindless,
cupcake robots than meaningful human beings.
The movie's biggest disappointment is that the
filmmakers have taken Ross, the movie's only
character with any attempt at depth and dignity,
and not let her come out on top.
It appears that the only prerequisites for the
Ira Levin movie heroine, whether she's a
weakling (Rosemary's Mia Farrow) or free and
spirited (Ross), is that she (1) be susceptible to
forces that freak her out and turn her completely
paranoid by movie's end and (2) that she be
flat-chested. As a matter of fact, in retrospect
The Stepford Wives seems nothing more than an
excuse to give Katharine Ross bigger breasts.
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a symposium on the future
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march 12
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marc
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mar
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8:00 - burr lounge
eliot and elizabeth janeway
informal rap
3:30 - union centennial room
human. relations in the year 2000
eliot and elizabeth janeway
7:30 room 242
revolution in education
8:00 - union ballroom
rob inglis and "erf"
Wednesday, march 12, 1975
daily nebraskan
COOPER f LINCOLN
54th & O STS. 404-7421
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PLAZA, Ti
12th & P STS.
477-1234
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New York Times
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