SECRET CEREMONY 1968 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2013/11/secret-ceremony-1968.html
Back before the days of celebrity tweets, 'round-the-clock entertainment networks, and broadcast news programs that deem it essential we know what stage of rehab the celebrity-of-the-month is in before enlightening us on the state of the economy; film fans had to get their Hollywood fix from movie magazines. And of the many periodicals available in 1968: Modern Screen, Photoplay, Movie Mirror, and Silver Screen, to name a few —it was difficult to find one that didn't feature either Elizabeth Taylor or Mia Farrow on its cover. The personal and professional lives of both actresses were hot topics that year, reflecting, conversely, a career on the ascendance (Rosemary’s Baby made Hollywood flower-child, Mia Farrow, into a star at the exact moment her controversial marriage to Frank Sinatra imploded), and a career in decline (after eight films together, the Taylor-Burton magic had begun to pall in the wake of a string of boxoffice flops). In March of 1968 (the starting date of production on Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony) Elizabeth Taylor was the main draw and attraction in a film which co-starred movie neophyte Mia Farrow, and would reunite Taylor with the director of her most recent film, the as-yet-to-be-released Taylor/Burton opus, Boom!; a big-budget adaptation of the little-known Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore . But by October of the same year, Boom! had (appropriately enough, given its title) already bombed spectacularly at the boxoffice, while Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski’s American film debut, had become a blockbuster hit and launched Mia Farrow as a star of tomorrow. Overnight, the two queens of the Hollywood tabloid press had become two above-the-title movie stars appearing in the same film. Suddenly, Secret Ceremony, the difficult-to-market Elizabeth Taylor arthouse vehicle adapted from an obscure short story by Argentinian author Marco Denevi, had a very hot property in its cast. Posters for the film subsequently beefed up Mia Farrow’s participation, unsubtly alluding to her new-found success wherever it could (“More haunted than in Rosemary’s Baby!” read the ad copy).
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I was just 11-years-old when I first saw Secret Ceremony, still flush with excitement from being caught up in the early throes of a lifetime fascination with Rosemary's Baby, a film I’d seen just a few months prior. Naturally, I was
Advance publicity for Secret Ceremony made extensive use of suggestive (and, in director Losey's opinion, misleading) images of Taylor & Farrow cavorting and bathing together, prompting superficial but boxoffice-baiting comparison to the forthcoming release of the lesbianthemed, The Killing of Sister George
fairly chomping at the bit at the prospect of seeing Mia Farrow in what looked to be another descent into horror, so, being secure in the belief that the film’s “Intended for Mature Audiences” rating accommodated know-it-all 11½-yearolds, I saw Secret Ceremony the week it opened.
Death & Rebirth A graveside encounter where the sorrow and guilt of a childless mother (Taylor) conjoin with the forlorn loneliness of a motherless child (Farrow).
As it turns out, the combined marquee value of Taylor and Farrow proved no match for how taken aback '60s audiences were at seeing these two movie magazine divas in a sordid tale involving, as one critic cataloged, "...psychosis, incest, lesbianism, murder, suicide, obscenities...." Secret Ceremony in spite of its cast, was lambasted by critics and flopped at the boxoffice. I can't say that I was quite prepared for how "out there" Secret Ceremony was either, but—as should come as no surprise to anyone with a preteen in the house—there are few things more precocious (read: pretentious) than an
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11-year-old film buff. I saw Secret Ceremony several times in the fall of 1968, and, enjoying it a great deal, convinced myself (if, perhaps, no one else) that I both understood it and had a solid grasp what I was watching. Not so much. When, in later years I revisited the film as an adult, I was surprised to find myself confronted with a movie significantly altered with age. Somehow in the intervening years, Secret Ceremony, a movie I had once thought I'd only liked, had morphed into a film I loved! An offbeat oddity of a movie that’s as likely to impress some viewers as absurdist camp as readily as others are apt to view it as a deeply disturbing psychological exercise in magic realism; Secret Ceremony is full of motifs and themes that strike me as unimaginably obscure and inaccessible without benefit of a few years’ worth of life experience. In other words, there is no way in hell that my 11-year-old self understood "What do you know about drowning?" this movie. "Ducks don't drown." While visiting the grave of her ten-year-old daughter who drowned five years prior due to some real or imagined “neglect” on her part, Leonora (Taylor), a London prostitute, finds herself being followed by a strange, child/woman (Farrow) who insists that Leonora is her mother. That the mostly silent girl, named Cenci, recalls to Leonora her own dark-haired, hungry-eyed daughter, she allows herself to be taken to the girl's home—a huge, opulent mansion where Cenci resides in solitude—and learns that she herself bears an uncanny resemblance to Cenci’s mother, a woman whose illness and recent death the obviously unbalanced Cenci has failed to accept. Out of delusion, shared loss, mutual need, and subtle self-interest, an unspoken Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora Grabowski (I kid you not) agreement is seized upon; each allows the other to use them as an instrument of atonement for unforgiven past familial transgressions. Leonora blames herself for her daughter's death, Cenci feels guilt for attempting to gain sexual superiority over her mother with Alfred, her stepfather. These feelings are agonizing demons of guilt and regret that can only be exorcised by engaging in cryptic, ritualized ceremonies of reenactment and transference. What makes Secret Ceremony a film that feels richer and more textured with each viewing is the fact that, in this tenuous psychological merging of damaged souls (which, for all its artifice and deceit, comes from a deeply sincere desire for intimacy), it is not made readily apparent which parties are consciously engaging in delusional roleplaying and which are merely incapable of determining reality from fantasy. That “reality” here is presented as a
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flexible, circular extension of perception (What roles do we all play? Is there a difference between identity and selfperception? What responsibility does one person have to another?), is what makes Secret Ceremony —a not very well-regarded film by critics and audiences alike—one of my absolute favorites.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Secret Ceremony is a rarity amongst my list of favorite films inasmuch as it’s a movie I enjoy and admire a great deal, yet I don’t know of a single soul to whom I could recommend it in good conscience. The film is just that weird. For me, it has Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow giving fascinating, sharper-than-appearances-belie performances to recommend it (they stay true to their dysfunctional characters even at the risk of losing the audience), and the always-intriguing Joseph Losey, whose marvelous films, The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between reveal the artist’s deft hand at dramatizing offbeat psychological complexities. But chiefly, Secret Ceremony appeals to me because it addresses themes I find myself drawn to in film after film. Themes for which I so obviously harbor some kind of aesthetic predisposition, their mere inclusion in a movie’s narrative being enough to blind me to that film’s flaws. From even a cursory glance at the list of films I've written about on this blog, it’s obvious that I harbor a particular fondness for movies about psychological dysfunction and personality displacement (I don’t even want to think what that means). 3 Women, Images, Dead Ringers, The Maids, That Cold Day in the Park, Vertigo, and Black Swan, are all favorites having something to do with the shifting nature of identity and personality. Each is a melodrama or psychological thriller in which an individual or individuals (usually women) are at the center of a story which uses metaphor and allegory to explore themes of duality, role-playing, identity-theft, loss, longing, insanity, guilt, Mia Farrow as Cenci (pronounced Chen-Chee) Englehard redemption, and, most significantly for me, the basic human need to connect. When I saw Secret Ceremony as a preteen, its title struck me as nonsensical. Viewing it now, I discover that one of the things I most appreciate is how Losey establishes from the outset a recurring motif of ceremony and religious ritual (frequently in solitude or secret, like a confession) that serves to both underscore and emphasize the film’s primary theme: the pain of loss and the passing of evil.
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Robert Mitchum as Alfred
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Family Resemblance Cenci and her late mother, Margaret
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Observing the portrait of Cenci and her mother, Leonora reacts to the dual likeness to herself and her deceased daughter.
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Secret Ceremonies As a prelude to their ritualized games of incestuous role-playing, Albert, Cenci's lecherous stepfather, in a mock ceremonial gesture, places a wedding ring on her finger. All of the characters in Secret Ceremony engage in formalized patterns of behavior designed to avoid selfconfrontation and purge guilt.
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Leonora’s act of immediately removing her identity-concealing blond wig and washing her face after a john leaves her apartment is like a baptism ceremony designed to cleanse and wash away the “sin� of her actions.
As if enacting a passion play, Cenci engages in elaborate, incestuous, rape fantasies that cast her as a victim and absolve her of having to face her own sexual precocity or her repressed feelings of hostility and competitiveness toward her late mother.
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Religious imagery and iconography abound. Prayers recited to protect the fearful from harm; lullabies sung to quiet restless souls; and throughout, scenes take place in and around churches and cemeteries, heightened by the death/rebirth symbolism of funerals and baptisms. PERFORMANCES Indicative of Secret Ceremony’s all-encompassing strangeness is the fact that, even as I write (in all seriousness) about what a provocative and arresting film I consider it to be, I’m also fully aware and understand why for some it has become something of a camp classic of bad cinema (the scene where Taylor wolfs down an enormous e English breakfast and shows her appreciation with a huge, unladylike belch is an example). But for me, Secret Ceremony’s is an example of the kind of risky, baroque style of filmmaking that died out in the '70s (Ken Russell was a master). A kind that takes so many chances and goes so far out on a limb that it risks courting giggles. Daring to look foolish can sometimes be a film's most appealing quality.
In this scene, Elizabeth Taylor's excellent performance is undermined by unflattering costuming that is arguably character-based (Leonora is coarse and unsophisticated) or just plain ugly '60s mod.
Elizabeth Taylor long ago proved to be a natural for the brand of purple, overstated acting a film like this calls for,
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and Mia Farrow once again shows that there’s not an actress alive better suited to hitting all the right notes in a role requiring woman-child/sane-unstable ambiguity. As Alfred, personal fave Robert Mitchum rallies around his patented brand of complaisant sexual menace (if not a very sure accent. What is it supposed to be British? Scottish?) to ratchet up the psychodramatic stakes by going head to head (and psychosis to psychosis) with Taylor in a combustible test of wills. THE STUFF OF FANTASY Even as a kid I was blown away by the gorgeous mansion occupied in solitary madness by Mia Farrow's character. With its ornate furnishings; eclectic, Moroccan and art nouveau design; and those mesmerizing blue Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown are outstanding as the light-fingered, meddlesome aunts and green ceramic tiles that line the walls and hallways like some Dalieque mental institution of the mind...this house is as much a participant in Secret Ceremony's drama as The Dakota was in Rosemary's Baby.
Leonora, really getting into the whole playacting thing
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The mansion used in the film is Debenham House, located in the Holland Park district of London. Built around 1896, architect Halsey Ricardo is one of perhaps several who worked on its design. Secret Ceremony production designer Richard MacDonald is credited with refurbishing the house and designing studio sets (the main bedroom, for instance) to blend with the original style.
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THE STUFF OF DREAMS There’s no getting past the fact that Secret Ceremony is a strange film not suited to everyone’s taste. But another word for strange is interesting, and on that score I cast my vote for directors who take chances over those who play it safe. On the commentary track for the 1970 British cult film Goodbye Gemini (a remarkably bizarre film that could go toe-to-toe with Secret Ceremony for weirdness), producer Peter Snell speaks of a time when movies were made because someone found a story to be interesting, paying only marginal heed to things like what market the film should target and how well it would play outside of big cities. While this was probably a terrible way to run the “business” side of the movie business, quite a lot of worthwhile films were made. Not necessarily good ones, but at least they were films that sparked debate, discussion, and thought. Secret Ceremony has Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum giving two of their better late-career performances (Taylor, in Ken Russell made use of the mansion in his 1974 film Mahler particular, is quite moving), and early-career Mia Farrow giving what amounts to her last cogent performance before her Woody Allen years (although I’m partial to 1977’s The Haunting of Julia), so therefore I think it's worth at least a look if you’re unfamiliar with it. But remember, I’m not exactly recommending it. I’m just sort of dropping a hint.
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It's time to speak of unspoken things...
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Dear God, by whose mercy I am shielded for a few hours Let no one snatch me from this heaven
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Copyright © Ken Anderson
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