SECRET CEREMONY
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
A list of loony tune movies out of the 60s wouldn't be complete without Joseph Losey's SECRET CEREMONY. The 11th Hour psycho craze had already started ebbing by the time prostie Elizabeth Taylor and unhinged, rich waif Mia Farrow pretended to be mother and daughter, with Robert Mitchum sniffing around as a nubilphile stepdaddy. But the shock of Liz -- double chinned, teeth eaten away by the booze, in Woolworth black pajama-like blouse and skirt, legged in diamond-shaped mesh stockings -- on her way to St. Mary Magdeline Church to pray after apparently fellating a john and then heading towards the church's cemetery to drop flowers on her daughter's grave, with wacky Mia trailing her, delusionally believing Liz is her own mother come back from the dead,is just too irresistibly bad not to get suckered in.
Adapted by George Tabori from an award-winning short story by Argentinean Marco Denevi, SECRET CEREMONY was at first a vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, who wanted to make in South America. Difficulties with rights and other factors intervened, and it's our loss, because, one surmises, Bergman probably wanted a stab at "magic unrealism," which is the territory the original story seem to be headed. Under Tabori, and Losey's dullard's cool, it has become a crash course on pseudo Henry Jamesion schizophrenia, molestation and a mother's love gone bonkers. Throw in Dames Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown as "slightly Jewish" dyke kleptos for good measure and it all becomes a comedic 60s freakfest. We'll never know what Bergman would have allowed; with Liz, any pretensions toward refinements were put on the back burner and what's cookin' is a meal of mockery, debasement and sexual peccadilloes. She serves up one deliciously bad entree after another: every moment she's in she's so over-seasoned that watching her could cause a fast track to the toilet. But she's a shitcan kind of actress anyway -- blowing out lines and facial reactions that only the trisulfide of matches could dissipate. One of the worst sequences she's ever had as an actress is here: dressed in a grape juice lavender suit to hide her bulging tummy and flabby ass cheeks (Mitchum's Albert calls her "a cow"), she warns Ashcroft and Brown to quit their heisting at Mia's mansion or she'll "cig the cops" on them. You can't quite be sure if Lousy, I mean Losey allowed Liz her various bad accents, her awful inflections and readings, because it would be best to leave well enough alone -- this movie being one of the few in which the world's most famous movie star never caused any trouble -- or if he thought that what's transpiring is supposed to this terribly funny. There is, to be sure, intentional satire: Liz has the queenly first name of Leonora, but we hee-hee at her last: Grabowski. She's a blond when prostituting but in natural dark when washing out her mouth and on a bus on her way to church. The quintessence of self-ridicule is when, roughly twenty minutes into the movie, Mia, calling Liz "mummie," serves breakfast. Stuffing her face with sausages and croissants, belching afterwards, it's got to be Liz deprecating, because if it were anything else, we'd all die from the embarrassment.
After we get to know famous actors' acting styles, in most cases we end up unavoidably "seeing" their duplication of technique; we see in their performances a laziness, a reliance on what worked in the past, using tricks and methods we reluctantly accept out of fondness. And no celebrated star as actress has been more guilty of laziness than Liz. Out of the MGM School of Acting, Liz knows how to hits her marks and play scenes, as opposed to playing a sustained characterization. I don't think she has ever been totally successful as an adult character, not even in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, in which she has about a half dozen of cinema's greatest bitchouts. Part of this has to do with her lack of training, part of it her own limitations, part of it directors afraid of her fame and its accompanying power. Most of it has to do with Liz's own use of fame: she does what she pleases because she is Liz. Her string of flops after WOOLF? -- including SECRET CEREMONY -- are no one's fault but hers; she took the millions and in the process lost millions of viewers. People got tired of seeing her in roles she was too old for (THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN) and too young for (BOOM!), and most especially got fed up with her variations of Martha: in BOOM!, SECRET CEREMONY and, though she's as her most zesty and audience-pleasing vulgar, X, Y AND ZEE. She got so lazy as an actress that she accepted herself in movies she clearly shouldn't have done: HAMMERSMITH IS OUT, the abominable DIVORCE HIS; DIVORCE HERS, NIGHT WATCH, THE MIRROR CRACK'D. Even if it's a dressup fantasy, ASH WEDNESDAY has a few scenes in which the old Liz magic of "scene playing" is on display: looking more beautiful than one can imagine, she dances with butched up (well, as butch as possible) Helmut Berger and you can really feel her apprehensions. To her credit, Liz has never been afraid of doing the controversial: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, WOOLF?, as well as the way off offbeat stuff -- REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, SECRET CEREMONY and THE DRIVER'S SEAT. She was onto something daring, onto modern madness in SEAT, about a woman bent on having someone kill her, but she needed a director who knew what a movie should look like, and how to frame the subject. (It's appalling, but that's what makes it watchable.) For SECRET CEREMONY, Losey decided to let Liz look as seedy as the story and as seedy as he looked (see pictures of him in Michel Ciment's CONVERSATION WITH LOSEY), and while more effective today because the movie's a curiosity piece, he'd have gotten more out of his star had he curbed her swaying delineation: she's all over the place, grabbing bits of Martha's shrew for this scene, faking two or three accents for that scene, going for a displaced glamour when everything else fails. She looks fat, but seems the smallest, most inconsequential against skinny Mia.
Farrow is absolutely terrific as the deranged nubile with the nail-scratching-against-the-blackboard name of Cenci who may or may not be a vixen - a fruitcake bi-Peter Pan trapped in permanent adolescence. I can recall that when I first saw the movie, I was turned off by her; maybe I couldn't get passed the fact that she could never be Frank Sinatra's wife. (Ava Gardner's famous quip still resonates: "I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a little boy.") In fact, the marriage was in deep trouble during the movie's filming, so this could be one of those "lose myself" roles as form of protection; whatever it is, it works. She's a marvel at every turn: she's instant bananas when she sits down next to Liz on the bus; she's eerily uncomfortable to us when she's brushing Mummie's hair and could be attempting to put the make on her; and again she unnerves us when she joins Liz in a post-CLEOPATRA bathtub; she has just the right teasing ambiguity playing games with stepdaddy Mitchum; she's indescribably perfect feigning rape and pregnancy; she's flesh crawling when rubbing Liz's back; and she pulls out all the sedated dementia-in-full-bloom stops to achieve her finale -- not unexpected but very effective. If SECRET CEREMONY eventually becomes a cult classic -- and it could -- it will be Mia who gets the credit: here's a lunatic eager for sin.
In his leprechaun beard, great swagger (which Brown and Ashcroft have fun mimicking) and boozy W.F. Buckley face, Robert Mitchum's a rather subdued roue, a stepfather who casually dismisses incest as "a rather boring symptom of the private property system." He can never give a permanent address because he's always on the run from the law, chasing him down over his inability to keep his hands off female students. When Mitchum signed on to do the role of Albert, he said Losey and Tabori did "some weird things with that script. They were in trouble when I got there, and I don't think I improved the situation any." Yet he did: though Albert isn't in the original story, his inclusion - however Psyche 101, or powered as if on remote control - is part of Mia's Cenci's cause and effect of sexual precocity.
The craziness is the intended star, but it's the real house that steals the picture. Colder, mazier urban British digs would be difficult to find: construction starting in 1898, and completed five years later, its eclectic style is the result of several architects, and its most outstanding features, aside from the labyrinth of halls, rooms, nooks and crannies, are the Moorish style balconies and woodwork and the blue and aquamarine tiles that are in the interior and on the exterior. Scouting locations, Losey remembered the house because he'd often pass it when he'd take his son to a nearby school, and even production Richard MacDonald knew of it, though at first he thought it wasn't quite right for the picture's neurotic ambiance. Until, that is, he and Losey went to see it: having ironically been used for a time by a church organization to house the mentally ill, they found it a gold mine of possibilities. (They only had to clean up grounds, restore the William Morris wallpaper, the art nouveau objects, fixtures and add furniture. Mia's mother's bedroom and attached bath were sets but their designs were faithful to the house.) Notwithstanding Losey's claims, there's nothing about the sickies who live within the story that we'd care to believe as "realistic," but we can giggle our way through the psychoturgy by seeing these dementia peacocks perform their rituals as a result of the house's influence: they've been overtaken by the its maddening esoterics.
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