Much to my surprise, in the cast and credits of my copy , Ira Levin is not mentioned (nowadays, Pierre Boulle's name is not mentioned in the new franchise of "planet of the apes" either ) However , the screenplay borrows his best moments from the author of "Rosemary's baby"!
These moments are to be found in the first part: the journalist ,arriving in Stepford town and discovering the old-fashioned clothes of the female inhabitants ; the books in the bookshop dealing with home , the crash and the woman repeating the same lines ; the never-to-be- found hospital; the scene in the chemist's where the injured woman acts like she never met the heroine .
This latter scene and the meeting with the man who begins to get tired of a pure housewife are less derivative : "make her change" the journalist says "it can't change" the desperate man answers.
The men's association has pushed the envelope :the women are no longer killed and replaced by robots ; now it's a siren which forces the housewives to take some pills-under a ridiculous pretext- after they undergo a special operation .
The heroine, a bachelor , does not possess Katherine Ross 's charisma ;besides ,the latter was married and thus was a potential victim .The women are too robotic, the macho speech against woman's lib of the villain -here again not as scary as deadpan Patrick O'Neal - is overkill :all was implicit in Levin's book .
A curio for people who enjoyed the book and the first MTV film.
These moments are to be found in the first part: the journalist ,arriving in Stepford town and discovering the old-fashioned clothes of the female inhabitants ; the books in the bookshop dealing with home , the crash and the woman repeating the same lines ; the never-to-be- found hospital; the scene in the chemist's where the injured woman acts like she never met the heroine .
This latter scene and the meeting with the man who begins to get tired of a pure housewife are less derivative : "make her change" the journalist says "it can't change" the desperate man answers.
The men's association has pushed the envelope :the women are no longer killed and replaced by robots ; now it's a siren which forces the housewives to take some pills-under a ridiculous pretext- after they undergo a special operation .
The heroine, a bachelor , does not possess Katherine Ross 's charisma ;besides ,the latter was married and thus was a potential victim .The women are too robotic, the macho speech against woman's lib of the villain -here again not as scary as deadpan Patrick O'Neal - is overkill :all was implicit in Levin's book .
A curio for people who enjoyed the book and the first MTV film.