Secret Ceremony (1968) ****½
Seventeen minutes into Secret Ceremony, all you can confidently say about anything that’s going on is that it’s 11:00 in the morning, and at least one of the two characters introduced thus far is completely fucking insane. You can’t even be sure which one is the loony! More pieces of the puzzle are presented at smartly spaced intervals thereafter, but it isn’t until somewhere around the halfway mark that the contours into which those pieces fit become more than very faintly visible. It takes a lot of nerve to keep an audience in the dark like that for so long, and even more skill to hang onto the viewers’ interest while doing it— to keep them engaged for nearly an hour without so much as letting on for sure what kind of story you’re telling. Joseph Losey would almost inevitably have nerve to spare, though, after emerging more or less unscathed in Britain from his mid-50’s Hollywood blacklisting, and he’d demonstrated the magnitude of his skill with the dark side of moviemaking seven years before Secret Ceremony, when he piloted These Are the Damned to a triumph too disturbing for two paying publics. This film is even more extraordinary than the earlier one, for it is equally discomfiting in its way, but does not suffer from the handicap of a wince-inducing failed stab at youth-culture alarmism.
In the hours before the clock strikes eleven, a tackily glamorous 30-something woman who turns out to be named Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor, whose other very rare descents into our usual territory include Night Watch and Doctor Faustus) wearily and dispiritedly gets herself ready to go out while a virtually unseen man leaves her apartment in the background. Leonora’s destination is the grave of ten-year-old drowning victim Judith Frances Grabowski, but that isn’t immediately apparent. On the bus ride across London to the churchyard, Leonora is accosted by an adolescent girl (Mia Farrow, of Rosemary’s Baby and See No Evil) who pleadingly addresses her as “Mummy,” but otherwise remains completely silent. Leonora ignores her, and gets out of the bus at the next stop. The strange, reticent teen follows her, not merely off the bus, but all the way to the cemetery. Then, after Leonora has finished communing with the dead girl, the live one takes her hand and leads her to a vast, museum-like mansion surrounded by a walled garden that might as well be a park. Through it all, the only indication that Leonora recognizes the girl is a quick flash back to one of the photos on display in her apartment, which depicts a child who could have grown into this peculiar teenager, but might also be somebody else altogether. The house, meanwhile, seems to stir no recognition at all, despite the presence of numerous photographs depicting a woman who similarly might be a younger version of Leonora. The pair eventually do begin speaking to each other once inside, but that’s no help to us at all in figuring out what’s afoot here. They seem to be having two conflicting versions of the same conversation, with each addressing the other as someone whom she does not believe herself to be. By the time Leonora finishes the breakfast the girl makes her (and for whatever this is worth, Leonora surely doesn’t eat like someone accustomed to the behavioral norms that accompany a house like this one), we’ve reached the state I’ve already described. There’s no room for doubting that one or the other of these people is barking mad, but there’s also no telling which. Maybe they both are. In any case, the pair nevertheless fall into a twisted semblance of a mother-daughter relationship before the day’s end, by which point we finally have a name to attach to the girl: Cenci.
Things get even weirder the next day. Shortly before noon, the doorbell rings; Cenci expects that’ll be Aunt Hilda (Pamela Brown, from The Night Digger and Dan Curtis’s Dracula) and Aunt Hannah (The Wandering Jew’s Peggy Ashcroft). She’s right, as it happens, and Leonora hides herself at once. The two old ladies are… how shall I put this? “Eccentrically awful” seems just about right. They bully their way around the house pestering Cenci for gifts, surreptitiously slipping small but obviously valuable objects into their purses, and heaping the girl with reproaches that we still don’t have enough information to understand fully. And frankly, we have no more reason at this point to believe the women to be truly Cenci’s aunts than we have to believe that Leonora is truly her mother. Two things stand out against the background of Hannah and Hilda’s incessant and barely coherent prattling. First, they make direct reference to Cenci’s mother’s grave, demanding to know why there aren’t any flowers on it. And more importantly, they gloatingly tell Cenci that somebody named Albert was arrested in Philadelphia. This is the second time we’ve heard that name, the first coming in the midst of yesterday’s disorientingly contrapuntal conversation, in which it seemed alternately that Albert was Cenci’s lover and her mother’s. Clearly the Awful Aunties are either lying or misinformed about that Philadelphia business, though, because Albert himself (Robert Mitchum, from Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear) comes calling later that day, after they have gone home, after Cenci has gone out on an errand, and after Leonora has come out of hiding to mull over what she saw and heard while eavesdropping on Hannah and Hilda’s visit. When Leonora doesn’t answer his knock, Albert slips a rose with his card attached to it into the mail slot, and stands out in the garden shouting for somebody named Margaret. Eventually, he gives up and goes away.
A day or so later, Leonora starts playing detective. Don’t ask me how, but she traces the Awful Aunties to the antique shop they run together— which I suspect is stocked to a non-trivial extent with items looted from Cenci’s house. This, at last, is where some real answers begin coming to light. Revelation the First: Leonora is definitely not Cenci’s mother; that would be the mysterious Margaret. She does, however, look an awful lot like Margaret at first glance, and she exploits that resemblance in her dealings with the Awful Aunties by posing as Margaret’s semi-estranged American cousin. Revelation the Second: Hannah and Hilda really are Cenci’s aunts, the younger sisters of her father, Gustav Engelhardt. Revelation the Third: Gustav and Margaret are both dead— Gustav since Cenci was only nine years old, and Margaret relatively recently, of a long, wasting illness— leaving Cenci sole heir to her father’s mammoth fortune. That would explain both the mansion and the Awful Aunties’ conviction that they’re entitled to steal anything they fancy from it. Revelation the Fourth: Albert was Margaret’s second husband, whom she justly banished from the house when she caught him sexually molesting Cenci. And Revelation the Fifth: Cenci, despite her childlike appearance, is really (like the actress portraying her) well into her twenties, but such is the nature of the madness that came over her in the wake of Margaret’s death that she has been regressing steadily in mental age toward a point more consistent with her inability to face life without her mother. Leonora becomes rightly incensed at the blithe manner in which the Awful Aunties take advantage of Cenci’s incompetence— to say nothing of their failure to lift a finger in protection of her against the abuse they plainly knew was going on— and she takes her leave of the antique shop with what amounts to a declaration of war. The next time Hilda and Hannah show their faces around the Engelhardt mansion, they’ll be departing in the back of a police car.
As for Leonora, her story, once it finally comes out, is only a little less tragic than Cenci’s. The deceased Grabowski girl was her daughter, killed in an accident for which she thoroughly blames herself. The details never emerge, but they don’t matter too much, really. Suffice it to say that Leonora’s attention wandered at exactly the wrong moment, and that was it for little Judith. It also isn’t clear whether Leonora was a prostitute to start with, or whether she took up that occupation only after her daughter’s death destroyed her marriage to the girl’s father. What is obvious is the way her loss compliments Cenci’s, together with the temptation that creates for her to cooperate with and indeed encourage Cenci’s insanity. Cenci would have a mother again; Leonora would have a daughter again; and as a humongous bonus, Leonora would also have the Engelhardt millions to play around with— which of course she’d do without any of the Awful Aunties’ avarice, right? Leonora hasn’t figured on Albert, however, or indeed on Cenci’s own understanding of her relationship with her stepfather, which is as twisted as everything else in her mad, death-haunted world.
I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Universal Studios picture from the late 1960’s starring Elizabeth Taylor (for that matter, I can barely believe I’m reviewing an Elizabeth Taylor movie in the first place), but Secret Ceremony is easily the weirdest thing I’ve seen in ages. It is toweringly strange, monumentally strange; its strangeness first becomes visible as if looming up over the horizon during the uncomfortably abrupt and ineffably archaic main titles, and commands more and more attention with each passing minute. The film defies genre categorization, partaking of psychological horror, family melodrama, and even gothic romance in a cockeyed sort of way, without ever settling on any of them or indeed even acknowledging the expectation that it should do so. It goes out of its way to be confusing at a point in the narrative conventionally devoted to bringing the audience up to speed on the characters’ identities, relationships, and situations, then spends the entire second act making up for lost expository time. It builds its story around a lunatic who turns out to be both mostly harmless and extremely vulnerable to all manner of exploitation, and puts her in a position where her unrepentant sex-predator of a stepfather is probably the best available influence upon her! And most of all, it approaches the subject of mental illness from a direction that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen used before.
Of the characters with whom we spend enough time to form a solid sense of their personalities, the Awful Aunties come nearest to psychological normality. Hannah and Hilda aren’t crazy— they’re just totally without scruples of any kind. Albert, strangely enough, does have principles, but they’re distorted and diseased, driving him to self-deception (and toward efforts to deceive everyone else to match) rather than integrity. Unlike the aunts, who waste neither time nor energy defending or apologizing for their treatment of Cenci, Albert has spent years erecting a complicated edifice of bullshit justification for his noxious behavior. Clearly it matters a great deal to him that he be understood (both by himself and by others) not only to be doing no harm to any of the young women whom he takes advantage of in his capacity as lecherous college professor, but also to be doing good for his stepdaughter as the only person to recognize who she really is or what she really needs. The truly horrifying thing is that he’s kind of right about that last part. Leaving aside for now the grotesque way in which he acts on his understanding, Albert really is the only one in Cenci’s life (Cenci herself included) who gets that she is a grown woman, and that those who would encourage and abet her retreat back into childhood do her no favors, whatever their intentions toward her. Leonora may wish Cenci only the best, but in playing to her psychotic wish for a replacement mother, she does her every bit as much damage as Albert or the Awful Aunties. And of course Leonora’s dealings with Cenci call her own sanity into question as well. She may not be mad yet, but she undoubtedly is flirting with madness by folding herself into Cenci’s. Secret Ceremony thus has no secure anchor in “reality,” no perspective on its story that isn’t in some sense delusional. As a consequence, it remains extremely disorienting even after Losey backs away from the deliberate obfuscation of the opening act.
The performances of the major players contribute much to that disorientation, too, albeit in two markedly different ways. To begin with the most readily classifiable, Mia Farrow is inarguably brilliant as Cenci. Although in the abstract, it strains credulity to imagine a woman in her early twenties being mistaken by everyone who sees her for a girl in her early teens, in practice, it’s really much more difficult to believe that Secret Ceremony was made later the same year as Rosemary’s Baby. Farrow presents every indication of being little more than a child here, and knowing that she isn’t turns every one of Cenci’s scenes into an even bigger mind-fuck than they would have been anyway. The remaining key performances, on the other hand— those of Robert Mitchum, Pamela Brown, Peggy Ashcroft, and especially Elizabeth Taylor— are so puzzling that it’s nearly impossible to judge whether they’re almost as great as Farrow’s, or stunningly, perfectly terrible. I was not at all surprised to learn that John Waters counted Secret Ceremony among his favorite films, for it would be the easiest thing in the world to dismiss it as the very pinnacle of camp. Look at it closely, though, and you’ll be hard-put to find the slightest trace of irony, self-parody, or even self-awareness anywhere. It’s a densely absurd movie, and nowhere is that plainer than in the avalanche of ham unleashed by all of its “adult” stars, yet it’s also a film that commits utterly to all of its absurdities. In such a context, anything more subtle than these colossal histrionics would have been an equally colossal mistake. Taylor, Mitchum, Brown, and Ashcroft need to be histrionic, because Leonora, Albert, Hilda, and Hannah are histrionic themselves. It doesn’t really matter, then, from which direction they come by their just-right wrongness; either way, they all bring the crazy by the bucket-full, with seriously unsettling results.
As you might have heard, Elizabeth Taylor died earlier this year. For some unfathomable reason, we B-Masters decided it was imperative that we dedicate our next roundtable to the memory of that most un-B of mid-century Hollywood stars, and this review is my contribution to that project. Click the banner below to see how my collegues have eulogized her.
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