Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

blanche-2 "The Secret Ceremony" is a 1968 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, and Robert Mitchum. Filmed in England, it's directed by Joseph Losey. I've seen many of Losey's films, but this one beats them all.It's a very dark movie about a prostitute, Leonora (Taylor) whose daughter drowned. A young girl named Cenci (Farrow), who somewhat resembles her daughter, starts following her; Leonora resembles Cenci's dead mother -- in fact, Cenci has never accepted her mother's death and thinks Leonora is her mother. Taylor plays along; she needs a daughter to love, and the girl is wealthy.During a seaside vacation, the emotionally disturbed Cenci becomes a little too emotionally disturbed for Leonora's taste, and the fantasy is threatened.Robert Mitchum plays Farrow's stepfather, a pedophile who had a bizarre relationship with Farrow."Secret Ceremony" is a film about unresolved relationships -- Cenci's unresolved relationship with her late mother, Leonora's unresolved relationship with her late daughter, as well as her guilt, and how both women try for closure using one another.Bizarre isn't the word! The very beautiful Taylor is top-notch and wears some great outfits (and in fact, she's the only reason I watched this film); Farrow plays the waif she perfected in "Rosemary's Baby." Mitchum is miscast as Cenci's stepfather - he slips in and out of an approximation of a British accent and doesn't seem too comfortable. It's not much of a role.Losey is responsible for a few whacked-out films but this one takes the cake. It is interesting and disturbing, but if it hadn't been for Taylor, I don't think it would have succeeded as much as it did -- which in my opinion, was very little. Still, Losey films have some fascinating, provocative elements to them, and this one is no exception.

jacegaffney Of all the directors who earned names for themselves in the last century, Joe Losey took disagreeable pretentiousness to levels that made root canal (no, water boarding) look preferable in comparison. Even those closest to him have confessed not to know - short of a monstrous ego - what made him tick. My take is that all the hugger-bugger and obscure pooh-faced pretentiousness was covering over a fundamentally gay outlook (but a MORBIDLY gay outlook) that he believed needed to be wrapped in layers and layers of ornate obfuscation to pass muster as meaningful art.If you think about it, a preponderance of Losey deals with characters who carry dark secrets around with them until an inevitable implosion occurs. The two best are, THE PROWLER (1951), and, surprisingly, MR.KLEIN(1976), with Alain Delon - coming near the end of Losey's run. In these two films, the secrets, the dual identities, are clear enough so that the patented menace and stealthy suggestiveness provide a tone of added interest to the melodramatic proceedings. The converse of this brooding portentousness is MODESTY BLAISE (1966), which, contrary to the world,I believe to be the TRUE Losey, the scared, pretentious man-child finally coming out of the closet - full bore - and making violent sport of secrets and double agents, using the full panoply bag of tricks to express his discontent in the form of liberating high (very high) camp. (Bogarde(as alter-ego) was the director in a refreshingly comic, self-mocking mode.)But the masterful farce atmosphere was a one-term holiday. In retrospect, his greatest critical success, THE SERVANT (1963), made him think that a load of unresolved bad conscience could lure art-house patrons to a life time of devotion to his curious, cork-screw angst. Pinter granted him this. But SECRET CEREMONY (1968) is Pinter without Pinter, closer to trash can Edward Albee, (why did Losey never direct Albee? The two seemed to be made for each other.) This Liz Taylor-Mia Farrow chamber pot play is so bad that even the most dedicated Losey adherents need be restrained from jumping the aisles.NOTE OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE: Later on in life, I met John Farrow, Jr.. He told me that his one responsibility on the set of the film, SECRET CEREMONY, was keeping the badly bearded Robert Mitchum from disappearing off the premises into one of the thousand and two pubs existing in London at the time.One would BUY the man his own bar to hear from the horse's mouth candid commentary on the shooting of SECRET CEREMONY.Rating: Below a 6 doesn't make the cut in my books. I give it a 5 but really - rating wise - no rating for this sad sack picture is warranted: minus 5.Was this review helpful to you?

Putzberger This movie is a tad pretentious and muddled, but it'll get under your skin. All the characters are either so deluded (crazy rich girl Mia Farrow), desperate (middle-aged hooker Liz Taylor) or demonic (scummy pedophile Robert Mitchum) that watching it is like spending two hours in a psych ward with no attendants on duty. Also gripping is the atmosphere created by director Joseph Losey, who was considered as a genius in the 60s and is pretty much forgotten today. With wide-angle shots and a minimum of noise, Losey reinforces his characters' isolation and solipsism by making London, one of the most crowded cities in the Western world, seem as empty and quiet as a tomb.The plot is a psychological inversion of the classic haunted house story -- Liz and Mia take shelter from an outside world that threatens their relationship. And that relationship is, to put it mildly, weird. Mia lures Liz into her huge, empty home because she resembles her late mother. Liz indulges Mia's fantasy because as a homeless prostitute she's in need of shelter, plus, she lost a daughter who looked a lot like Mia. This arrangement could be sweet to the point of treacly if these two grown women didn't enjoy doing things like bathing together and discussing ex-lovers. And Mia has a particularly repulsive ex-lover in Mitchum, her former stepfather who started molesting the girl in her early teens. Though the experience clearly ripped Mia to shreds, the creep still has some power over her and the film becomes a battle of wills between Taylor and Mitchum. Along the way there's a fake pregnancy, a nightmarish seaside holiday and a visit to Mia's two horrid old-maid aunts. The movie isn't particularly pleasant or coherent, but it does pull off the impressive feat of telling its story the way its characters are experiencing it, and that's pretty damn disturbing when you're dealing with a bunch of warped people. See it, then watch a romantic comedy or something so you're able to sleep that night.

boblipton The major talents involved with this movie -- director Joseph Losey and actors Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow, have done some great work and some lousy work -- Mitchum was inclined to phone in performances unless he got interested. But, like many people who get involved with the arts, when they were doing something on the edge, they doubtless knew they could fail -- but a lot of the people here seem to fall into the common fallacy that great talent can never fail -- as if DONOVAN'S REEF is a great film because it was directed by John Ford or A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG was a laugh riot because it was directed by Chaplin. Or that every performance given by Paul Newman was great. Sometimes people make mistakes and the greater the genius, the greater the mistakes.About the only good thing I can say about this movie is that the camera work by Gerry Fisher is excellent and occasionally distracting. After that, everything bogs down because of the idiotic, minimalist story in which nothing is ever really explained -- but the plot is that psycho Mia Farrow's mother has just died so she falls in with psycho hooker Elizabeth Taylor, whose daughter has just died, until psycho step-daddy Bob Mitchum, in a hideous beard and sporting an accent that varies form Irish to Australian to his basic accent, discourses on statutory rape.That's very little to build a hundred-minute movie on and, despite everyone -- except possibly for Mitchum -- doing their best, there are long periods of nothing. Some might look upon these as meditative sequences. I find them boring.So what is the result? You have characters you don't care about doing very little of interest in a cluttered world -- I suspect the set decorator was getting a kickback from prop suppliers -- and the question arises why this was released at all. Answer: because some people would go to see it based on the track record of the major talent involved and even if the project would not show a profit, at least the loss would be ameliorated.... and forty years later some money is still being picked up by showing it on cable TV.