Secret Ceremony (1968)

Director: Joseph Losey

Screenplay: George Tabori

Based on a short story by Marco Denevi

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora; Mia Farrow as Cenci; Robert Mitchum as Albert; Peggy Ashcroft as Hannah; Pamela Brown as Hilda

Canon Fodder

 

Ducks don't drown.

Continuing with the curiosities to be found in the filmography of Joseph Losey, an American expat who spent his later career in Europe and Britain, Secret Ceremony offers the curious site of Elizabeth Taylor, the legendary Hollywood actress, on a red double-decker English bus, which is odd, or a prolonged scene of her eating breaking and even burping, images you would have likely not seen back in her American films of the fifties a mere decade earlier. All of this is in an opening of a very strange film, made when the moral guidelines of yore were collapsing and idiosyncratic dramas existed, here funded by Universal Pictures and made in England. All in which Taylor's stranger Leonora, a woman still grieving for a lost child, is pulled into the lavish home of Mia Farrow's Cenci, frail yet with striking blue eyes, the heir of a great fortune whose mother had died. In almost a permanent child-like state, she takes to Leonora as her mother, (with the photo used actually looking like Taylor herself), and Leonora being brought in to role-play this out.

The result is the film quickly turning into a psycho dramatic role-play, Leonora happy act this out and eventually developing a protective bond over Cenci, a figure of clear psychological problems left defenceless in an ornate and elaborately decorated home. This game of role-play lingers, of Leonora the mother and Cenci the doting daughter, but with Cenci the person very much in her own world in this scenario she brings Leonora into. Farrow's performance is also the most striking aspect of Secret Ceremony. Even among everyone else, even Roger Mitchum with a beard, she stands out despite the character potentially being seen as broad, even problematic, but with Farrow giving the performance everything she has got so it becomes credible. In mind that a) the character is meant to be a possible trauma victim of molestation, least near with Mitchum's stepfather character, and that b) a manipulative side slowly reveals itself as the film goes, she gives a performance so good this works with complexity. Even the more exaggerated details, such as the game of pretending she is pregnant in public with a stuffed toy up her dress, Farrow nonetheless makes this all credible.

In general Secret Ceremony is a curious and deeply eccentric film; Losey is not a director I would view as an auteur with a clear set of ideas, but he was a working director who was fascinated with filming psychological dramas from this to The Servant (1963), one of his most iconic films penned by playwright Harold Pinter, who between his odd tangents (a Hammer horror film, Modesty Blaise (1966)), was fascinated with character dramas where pieces of their personalities are peeled away to reveal more layers. This film though does have its own distinct touches, as I do not think you would have found Cenci's two aunts in the Pinter work, two women allowed a moment of sympathy of being sisters ignored by her mother, but still openly pocketing priceless objects and ornaments each time they visit out of greed with pure exaggeration to their characters, even the antique store they run and live in Leonora storms into.

The late sixties in general is distinct as, with the film codes for American cinema dissipating, a film like this is still staying away from explicit content but is so much more frank about topics like sexuality, to the point the film still has a potency even in the modern day, its age actually allowing it to catch one's expectations off-guard with its strength in ideas and drama than content. (All the cussing, barring the f-word being changed for feck, with a colourful assortment of English words used, adds as much to this). It is an odd film to have where Robert Mitchum, of the old studio system, also has to adapt to this era too as a creepy scholar/step father who is attracted to his step daughter, believing that incest is the banal result of the private property system. Yet like Taylor, and Losey their director too, he adapts to this perfectly, enough to be a mirror for his future work in the seventies.

The same goes for Elizabeth Taylor, someone if you were to look at the start of the sixties, with Cleopatra (1963), went through an era of such drastic change, by way of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which would force her to drastically change to keep up. In comparison Mia Farrow, who would gain her acclaim from Rosemary's Baby (1968), was a new actress in comparison to Taylor, someone who originated in the studio system and by this point, as that system would die out, went along (especially with Richard Burton) in a curious list of films. Joseph Losey would direct her again, and Burton, in one such baffling curiosity Boom! (1968), a notorious adaptation of a notorious Tennessee Williams play which would also never get made like it turned out decades later. And that this paragraph has referenced three films from the same year - Secret Ceremony itself, Boom!, and a film called Rosemary's Baby which is an iconic film of the new era of Hollywood cinema at the time and in American horror - which are so different to each other, really does emphasis how distinct and at times weird this period in Hollywood was, bearing in mind co-productions, and for the better.

The film itself, if anything, has taken advantage of the fact it would never get made again. Affectively a slow burning chamber piece, Secret Ceremony does have changes in location, especially at the coast in the finale act, but a large part of it is down to only three key actors (Farrow, Taylor, Mitchum) and a main location in Cenci's mansion, a location which is so distinct it adds to this film of psychological games and conflict. Even in terms of how Secret Ceremony resolves itself, the film takes the least expected directions, [Major Plot Spoilers] be it a major character committing suicide and Mitchum being abruptly knifed in the final scene [Spoilers End], leaving one on something memorable. So in terms of another Joseph Losey film, this does emphasise more how I want to see his films, growing fond of him due to productions like this. In terms of this period in American cinema, there are plenty of films like this I also really want to see more of now.