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Secret Ceremony is a 1968 British psychological thriller film directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum. Based on the 1960 novel Ceremonia secreta by Argentine author Marco Denevi, the film follows an indigent prostitute who meets a strange young girl who insists that she is her long-lost mother.
Leonora hides when Cenci's aunts Hannah and Hilda unexpectedly visit the mansion. The aunts antagonise Cenci while surreptitiously stealing valuable objects, which is witnessed by Leonora. The next day, Leonora visits Hannah and Hilda at their antique shop, lying that she is Margaret's cousin. The aunts tell Leonora that Cenci took care of Margaret through her illness with no help, and that she refused to accept her mother's death. They also reveal that Cenci is 22 years old, despite looking and acting much younger, and that Margaret threw out Cenci's stepfather, Albert, after catching him trying to seduce Cenci. Leonora admonishes the aunts for failing to protect Cenci and warns them to stay away from the mansion.
While alone in the mansion, Cenci is visited by Albert. After she trims his beard, he asks her to make the moaning sounds she made while they had sex; she refuses but eventually obliges, leading Albert to kiss Cenci. Leonora returns to the mansion to find a shaken Cenci cowering under a sink, and Cenci mentions Albert's visit. Leonora and Cenci later check into a luxurious seaside hotel. That night, when Cenci arrives at the dining room sporting a fake baby bump, Leonora is stunned but plays along with the ruse.
The next morning, Albert arrives and confronts Leonora on the beach, declaring that Cenci is mentally unstable and had repeatedly tried to seduce him. Back in their hotel room, Cenci begins to kiss Leonora's back while giving her a back massage, before Leonora angrily tells Cenci to stop. Leonora then forces Cenci to face reality by ripping off her fake baby bump, sending Cenci into a frenzy. Later, from her balcony, Leonora witnesses Cenci and Albert having sex on the beach. When Cenci returns, she sends Leonora away, no longer seeing her as her mother.
Back in London, Cenci overdoses on pills, intending to commit suicide. Shortly afterwards, Leonora visits Cenci and begs to be allowed to stay in the mansion, but Cenci rebuffs her once again. As Leonora leaves, Cenci collapses to her death. Standing beside Albert in silence at Cenci's funeral, Leonora pulls out a knife and stabs him to death. Lying on her bed, Leonora listlessly hits the cord of a ceiling lamp while reciting a nursery rhyme about perseverance.
In an October 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Mitchum claimed that the film's production was "in trouble" when he arrived and that his presence did not help.
Kino Lorber issued a North American Blu-ray edition of the film on 21 April 2020. The British distributor Powerhouse Films subsequently released a Blu-ray in the United Kingdom.
Renata Adler in the New York Times wrote that it was "incomparably better" than its predecessor, Accident, and that beneath its "elaborate fetishism and dragging prose, there is a touching story of people not helping enough," but she admitted that the film had its "longueurs, but not beyond endurance."
Ernest Callenbach of Film Quarterly wrote it was "difficult to guess" what the film was about, but felt that its "dominant note, if there is one, is of Losey's usual creepy, misanthropic disgust with sex and how people misuse each other to get it." He also praised Mia Farrow's "touching and perverse and human" performance.
Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader lambasted the film as embodying the director's "worst tendencies as a filmmaker: the movie is cold without being chilling, confusing without being challenging."
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "This moody mistaken-identity melodrama quickly becomes a macabre muddle of daft sexual psychosis and suspect psychology when nympho Mia Farrow adopts prostitute Elizabeth Taylor as her surrogate mother after a meeting on a London bus. The return of Farrow's stepfather Robert Mitchum provides this meandering morsel of Swinging Sixties gothic with a suitably off-the-wall climax.
Dan Callahan at Senses of Cinema suggests that Secret Ceremonys failures may serve as its virtues, comparing the film favorably to Some Like It Hot (1959) or Duck Soup (1933).
Callahan writes:
Leslie Halliwell offers this concise critique: "Nuthouse melodrama for devotees of the director."
Bibliography
(1993). 9780521383868, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521383868
External links
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Secret Ceremony at AllMovie
Categories: 1968 Films, 1968 British Films, 1968 Thriller Films, 1968 English-language Films, 1960s Melodrama Films, British Psychological Thriller Films, English-language Thriller Films, Films About Grief, Films About Incest, Films About Prostitution In The United Kingdom, Films Based On Argentine Novels, Films Directed By Joseph Losey, Films Scored By Richard Rodney Bennett, Films Set In Country Houses, Films Set In London, Films Shot At Associated British Studios, Films Shot In London, Films Shot In The Netherlands, Universal Pictures Films
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