Secret Ceremony *** (1968, Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum, Peggy Ashcroft, Pamela Brown) – Classic Movie Review 5846

Dressed to the nines in Dior, Elizabeth Taylor plays a high-class hooker called Leonora, who acts as surrogate mum to haunted young Cenci (Mia Farrow), in director Joseph Losey’s really oddball 1968 British character study movie, Secret Ceremony, a mix of drama and thriller.

The two women enjoy a perfect relationship because they fill a vacuum in one another’s lives (each looks like the other’s dead relative). But then Cenci (Farrow)’s stepfather Albert (Robert Mitchum) turns up at their happy home…

Written by George Tabori and based on Marco Denevi’s short story Ceremonia Secreta, it is steamy, weird stuff that hardly does justice to its important cast and director. However, it is still consistently intriguing in its macabre way, and the acting is good, as you would expect from this cast, which also includes Pamela Brown, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael Strong and Robert Douglas. And Gerry Fisher’s Technicolor cinematography makes it a looker.

The cinema version runs 109 minutes. Avoid the cut 101-minute American TV version, which includes newly shot scenes for TV.

It was released on 23 October 1968 in the US and not till June 1969 in the UK.

Despite the star power, it struggled at the box office, costing $2,450,000 and earning $3 million at the North America box office.

The source short story won a $5,000 prize in a competition run by Life en Español, and it was previously filmed for Argentine TV, optioned in 1963 by Dore Schary.

Mitchum said the production was ‘in trouble’ when he arrived on set and that his presence there did not help.

It was mainly shot at Debenham House in London but also at Mary Magdalene Church in Paddington, around the Molyneux Monument in Kensal Green Cemetery, and the junction of Chepstow Road and St Stephen’s Mews in Paddington. The hotel and beach scenes were shot around the Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk, The Netherlands

Elizabeth Taylor,

The cast are Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora, Mia Farrow as Cenci, Robert Mitchum as Albert, Peggy Ashcroft as Hannah, Pamela Brown as Hilda, Robert Douglas as Sir Alex Gordon, George Howell as First Cleaner, Penelope Keith as Hotel Assistant, Roger Lloyd Pack as Cleaner, Angus MacKay as Vicar, and Michael Strong as Dr Walter Stevens.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5846

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