Drunk on the success of their previous collaboration, or perhaps just regular drunk, Elizabeth Taylor suggested pairing up with director Joseph Losey again! This was before Boom was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. I’m not going to make a joke about it being a bomb, because firstly that’s an incredibly lazy joke and secondly just about every critic seemingly did it at the time. How hack-ish. So less than a year after Boom was made but a few months prior to its release came another gorgeous looking melodrama about an ageing slapper with questionable mental health, with vast swathes of the earlier film’s creative team returning. Not all mind; Boom was made in Italy, but this here’s straight up all Britain, all the time (well, not really; a bit set at the beach was apparently the Netherlands). Despite that in-the-nutshell appraisal of the premise, it’s… quite a different feeling film. The trailer gives the impression of another camp fest, as does its general reputation, but it isn’t particularly.

In Secret Ceremony, Liz is back (actually she’s the only cast member shared with Boom, most of the talent overlap is behind the camera), this time around she plays Leonora Grabowski, though I don’t think the surname is ever mentioned in the film proper, a Catholic-guilt-ridden ageing prostitute who’s in mourning for her daughter who died several years before the start of the film. As you might guess, this film is a real jolly romp. While doing her rounds (not those ones), she finds herself followed by one Cenci Englehard (Mia Farrow), waifish and seemingly not all there but obscenely wealthy, who thinks Leonora is her own dead mother back from the grave. High jinks ensue. With Leonora conflicted over what to do, the pair enjoy some folie à deux, which gets complicated with the arrival of Cenci’s tongue-clicking aunts (Pamela Brown and Peggy Ashcroft),* who'd both be much less likely to buy into the idea that the woman’s recovered from that whole death thing and more likely to think that Cenci’s being scammed, sweetheart; I mean, god knows that they’d take full advantage given the chance; and of her mother’s ex-husband (Robert Mitchum, returning to the unsavoury step-father well seen in Night of the Hunter (1955)), whose relationship with neither his late wife nor his step-daughter seem quite on the up, to put it mildly. The proverbial ghost of Cenci’s awful mother (the actual one, not Leonora) haunts everything, but even Cenci might not be quite the innocent woman-child she seems.

Yeah, it’s a… complicated film, with no easy answers for what’s going on. Not having read the story upon which it’s based, the best comparison I can draw being to Angela Carter’s novella Love (1971). No one is particularly simple in their characterisation, and all skew heavily towards the ‘awful’ side of things. The fact that the most wholesome and pure-hearted character is the whore rather than the educated middle-class types seems like it riled some people back in the day. I expect most of the film’s reputation as camp stems from Taylor’s appearance; her acting style inherently exudes that sort of quality, and the tackiness inherent in her character by its very conception probably doesn’t help. Being as she’s meant to be a low-class prostitute masquerading as an upper-middle-class society woman, she frequently flits between codes in a manner that works in context, the implication being that she can’t always keep up the act as she gets buffeted on all sides by the various revelations and backstabbing of the family that she’s accidentally found her way into. More dubious is her accent, as Taylor vacillates between being English and American quite a bit. There’s a vague explanation for this in the script, but… it doesn’t really ring all that true. I more kind of get the impression that it was added in rewrites to explain it. I have no evidence of that, mind, so… Moving on, the other big half of the equation is Mia Farrow. Insert your own Mia Farrow joke here. She definitely has the look of the crazed woman-child down for this film. Of course, her character is, and she manages to flip between the sides of the coin quite convincingly. In case you were wondering, yes, her accent is also rather shaky, though not as much, despite Taylor actually being born in England and her big break coming as a result of being able to do the accent (doubly in case you were wondering, Mitchum’s character’s American; sorry if you were hoping to see him try and channel James Mason’s Humbert Humbert). Incidentally, it’s mentioned that Julie Christie was the first choice for Farrow’s part; I’m rather sceptical that it’d have worked. A large part of the film relies on Leonora thinking Cenci is a teenager, and the early-20s-ish Farrow is gangly enough for it to be plausible, whereas Christie in the same period (she’d have been about 27-28) seems like she’d have been a bit too… er… healthy looking to pass as such. Not that that stops films usually, but that’s by the by.

The bulk of the action was shot at Debenham House; an arts and crafts house which was originally the home of the department store magnate, now a grade I listed building. It apparently fascinated Losey, and so with the chance to shoot there, the film makes the most of it. Farrow and Taylor float about the ornate atmosphere with deliberately constructed shots that lend a dreamlike atmosphere to the fairly intense psychodrama playing out, with intricate movements, details and clues as to what is really going on. It’s rather a showcase for everyone involved; the first twenty-odd minutes of the film play out with little dialogue, and yet the film informs us remarkably about who these characters are and how they live. 

(Of course, there's a rather infamous alternative version of this film done for US television, which includes some bookending scenes of a lawyer and doctor discussing the case (in the unlikely event you didn’t guess, the film doesn’t end well for the characters) and generally making stuff extra obvious just in case the viewer is just too stupid to understand literally anything that's going on. The UK Blu-ray release includes these scenes in the extras; while the film's often rather opaque, they manage to spell out the really obvious bits, rather than making the harder-to-understand stuff more comprehensible, though they’re not so obvious given as some ADR in the denouement manages to land on the most blatantly wrong (and some might say, certainly I’d consider it, offensive) interpretation of what’s happening on screen. This isn't why it's infamous though. That's their attempts to sanitise that Liz Taylor's character is meant to be a prostitute; at the start of the film, there's a scene where a John's leaving her flat, after which she crawls over to the dresser and takes off a wig. They cut off that first part, and the doctor informs us in voiceover that she makes ends meet by modelling wigs for a department store. So that's a thing. Apparently, there are various cuts to the meat of the film, but I can’t find proper details of what they entailed; whether or not this covers the plot holes that the bookends seem to introduce otherwise, I don’t know. It also scrubs any mention of Losey, curiously enough, reediting the credits in a very unsubtle jerky fashion. Maybe he asked for it, or maybe there were still people in America bitter about his continued existence despite having been blacklisted. I mean, there are still people quite excessively bitter about Hanoi Jane nigh fifty years later, despite that whole expressing contrition thing and the bit where much said on the topic is demonstrably false.)

The actual official version of the film though is rather an odd beast, but nonetheless it’s an interesting watch and well worthy of study. The film steadfastly resists the simplistic interpretations of its sordid tale, as none of the players are quite who they seem to be in its complicated web of duality.



*As an aside, looking stuff up on this film, I notice a ton of things that always without fail refer to Liz Taylor as ‘Dame Elizabeth Taylor’ (which seems a bit weird to me as she didn’t have a DBE when this or really most other films being discussed were made, but I can’t be bothered to check proper etiquette when using these sorts of styles; that’s all beside the point anyway). These people don’t afford Peggy Ashcroft here the same consideration when dropping her name, even though she actually was Damed up long before even this thing was made (Ashcroft netted hers in ’56) and was essentially the Judi Dench of her day. Funny that.