Product Code Database
Secret Ceremony is a 1968 British psychological horror thriller film directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum. Based on the Argentine novel Ceremonia secreta by Marco Denevi, the film follows an indigent prostitution who meets a strange young girl who insists that she is her long-lost mother.
A resemblance of Leonora to Cenci's late mother becomes obvious once Leonora notices a portrait. Cenci, who is 22 but looks and acts much younger, asks Leonora to stay. A lie is told to her aunts, Hilda and Hannah, that Leonora is actually Cenci's late mother's cousin.
Cenci is found one day cowering under a table. Albert, her stepfather, has paid a visit. Cenci is terrified of him, claiming that Albert had raped her. Leonora is repelled by the man's presence until Albert tells her that Cenci is mentally unstable and had repeatedly tried to seduce him.
On a beach one day, Cenci and Albert have sexual relations. A despondent Cenci commits suicide. At the funeral, Leonora now knows whom she chooses to believe. After standing beside Albert in silence during the burial, Leonora produces a knife and stabs him.
The film ends with Leonora lying in the bedroom of her apartment, listlessly hitting the cord of a ceiling lamp while reciting a poem 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 Ceremony’s 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."
Footnotes
Sources
(1993). 9780521383868, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521383868
External links
Categories: 1968 Films, 1968 Drama Films, 1960s British Films, 1960s English-language Films, 1968 Thriller Films, British Psychological Horror Films, British Thriller Films, 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 London, Films Shot At Associated British Studios, Universal Pictures Films, English-language Horror Films, English-language Thriller Films
|
|
