The Stepford Wives

I first read Ira Levin's legendary The Stepford Wives when staying with friends - it was on the bookshelf in my bedroom and I devoured it one night before going to sleep (it's a pretty short book). I loved the story, the essence of which is so well known as not to need repeating here at length, save to say that a youngish couple relocate to apparently tranquil Stepford and find that the local  womenfolk are mysteriously subservient to the men. The story was a distant influence on one of the first short stories I ever published in the early 90s. Yet oddly enough I'd never watched the 1975 film all the way through until very recently. (The various sequels to the movie, and the 2004 remake are, according to reviews, best left unbroached.)

Levin was a gifted writer,with a flair for both plot and the evocation of atmosphere, but The Stepford Wives can also be seen as a satire. Not easy to write a book like that, but he managed it with aplomb. The film, with a script by William Goldman, lacks some of the subtlety of the source, but is still very watchable. I've read that Goldman was frustrated that the director, Bryan Forbes, wanted to cast his wife Nanette Newman as one of the wives. Goldman felt that, although Newman is a perfectly good actor, she didn't really fit the Stepford template, and I have to agree. But Forbes prevailed.

The lead role is taken by Katharine Ross, who is perhaps best known as Etta from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which Goldman also scripted.) Ross, a charismatic and beautiful woman, was ideal for the role, and I find it strange that, after those two fine movies, her career did not progress quite as one would have expected.

The men in the film are uniformly unpleasant (inevitable, given the subject matter of the story) and I can't remember Peter Masterson, who plays Ross's husband - a selfish lawyer (oh dear, yet another one!) - from any other film. He does a competent job, but the film belongs to Ross, and the scene where she comes face to face with her nemesis is genuinely chilling. By today's standards, the film is somewhat lacking in pace, but it remains very entertaining, and a fitting realisation of a brilliant idea from a brilliant writer.

The League of Gentlemen

For the first time in many years, I’ve watched The League of Gentlemen, the classic 1960 film from which the comedy show took its name. It’s a black and white movie, broadly in the tradition of the Ealing Comedies, and a thoroughly good period piece, as well as excellent light entertainment that has retained its charm and grip.

The film was based on a book published a couple of years earlier by John Boland. The story involves a redundant and embittered senior army officer, at odds with post-war British society, who hatches a plan to rob a bank. He decides to rope in a number of former military men who have fallen on hard times in the years since the war, and who have indulged in a variety of crimes or shady dealings, but who bring a range of skills to his heist team.

The ensemble cast is led by Jack Hawkins, at his imperious best, and is full of names who dominated British cinema and television for many years. They include Bryan Forbes, who directed (his wife Nanette Newman also has a small role), Richard – later Lord – Attenborough, Terence Alexander (best remembered as Charlie Hungerford in the long-running Jersey cop series Bergerac) and a host of other fine performers. Even Oliver Reed has a walk-on part.

It’s a movie quite different in style from The Italian Job, made only nine years later, but very much a product of the Swinging Sixties, while The League of Gentlemen harks bark to an earlier time. As for John Boland, he was a prolific thriller writer, but I am not familiar with his other work – though the success of his most famous book did prompt him to bring back the Gentlemen for subsequent adventures.