Leonora, a middle-aged prostitute, is despondent over the death of her daughter. Cenci, a lonely young woman, follows Leonora to the cemetery and strikes up a conversation with her, inviting Leonora to her home. Leonora is struck by the likeness between Cenci and her late daughter.
A resemblance of Leonora to Cenci's late mother becomes obvious once Leonora notices a portrait. Cenci, who is 22 but looks and acts much younger, asks Leonora to stay. A lie is told to her aunts, Hilda and Hannah, that Leonora is actually Cenci's late mother's cousin.
Cenci is found one day cowering under a table. Albert, her stepfather, has paid a visit. Cenci is terrified of him, claiming that Albert had raped her. Leonora is repelled by the man's presence until Albert tells her that Cenci is mentally unstable and had repeatedly tried to seduce him.
On a beach one day, Cenci and Albert have sexual relations. A despondent Cenci commits suicide. At the funeral, Leonora now knows whom she chooses to believe. After standing beside Albert in silence during the burial, Leonora produces a knife and stabs him.
The film ends with Leonora lying in the bedroom of her apartment, listlessly hitting the cord of a ceiling lamp while reciting a poem about perseverance.[8][9]
The short story on which the film is based won a $5,000 prize in a competition run by Life en Español. It had already been filmed for Argentine television when it was optioned in 1963 by Dore Schary.[10]
In an October 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Mitchum claimed that the film's production was "in trouble" when he arrived and that his presence did not help.[11]
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Secret Ceremony is constructed on the dualist view of man as a battleground for the twin aspirations of Good and Evil. Appropriately, in view of its schizophrenic theme, two is the film's magic number: two mothers and two daughters, two aunts, two fathers, two funerals, two baptisms (one actual, one metaphorical when Leonora accepts Cenci as her daughter), and above all, two temples of communion. ... In many ways, notably in its insidious illumination of the fascination of madness, Secret Ceremony reminds one of Lilith [1964], but the style is entirely Losey's own, a return to the crystalline ellipses of Accident [1967] after the opulent undulations of Boom! [1968], and with superb, unexpectedly funny characterisations by the entire cast."[15]
Renata Adler in the New York Times wrote that it was "incomparably better" than its predecessor, Accident, and that beneath its "elaborate fetishism and dragging prose, there is a touching story of people not helping enough," but she admitted that the film had its "longueurs, but not beyond endurance."[16]
Ernest Callenbach of Film Quarterly wrote it was "difficult to guess" what the film was about, but felt that its "dominant note, if there is one, is of Losey's usual creepy, misanthropic disgust with sex and how people misuse each other to get it." He also praised Mia Farrow's "touching and perverse and human" performance.[17]
Retrospective appraisal
Writing 30 years later after its release, John Patterson of The Guardian listed Secret Ceremony among the Losey films he dismissed as "woefully misguided material."[18]
Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader lambasted the film as embodying the director's "worst tendencies as a filmmaker: the movie is cold without being chilling, confusing without being challenging."[19]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "This moody mistaken-identity melodrama quickly becomes a macabre muddle of daft sexual psychosis and suspect psychology when nympho Mia Farrow adopts prostitute Elizabeth Taylor as her surrogate mother after a meeting on a London bus. The return of Farrow's stepfather Robert Mitchum provides this meandering morsel of Swinging Sixties gothic with a suitably off-the-wall climax.[20]Radio Times Guide to Films (18th ed.). London: Immediate Media Company. 2017. p. 814. ISBN9780992936440.</ref>
Secret Ceremony is a film that is so bad, so irredeemably, lovably foolish, that it provides the sort of life-embracing laughs many comedies fail to engender…Is there room to include such a film among a great director’s great works? Unless we are unnecessarily stuffy, which would miss the point of his career entirely, the answer has to be yes.[22]
Leslie Halliwell offers this concise critique: "Nuthouse melodrama for devotees of the director."[23]
Footnotes
^Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England, Stein and Day, 1974 p345
^Caute, David (1994). Joseph Losey. Oxford University Press. p. 222.
^"Big Rental Films of 1969". Variety. 7 January 1970. p. 15.
^Kehr, Dave (13 February 2012). "Secret Ceremony". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
^Callahan, 2003: It’s a perfect film for Mitchum, who gets to be menacing and sends up his lines. Bitter, twisted and pretentious."
^Callahan, 2003: “Secret Ceremony, however, is in a class all by itself. It is much funnier than either Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) or Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933) and rewards multiple viewings.
^Callahan, 2003: Ellipsis reads: “I have shown it on successive nights to large groups of people and all of them laugh uproariously throughout…”
^Halliwell, Leslie (1989). Halliwell's Film Guide (7th ed.). London: Paladin. p. 894. ISBN0586088946.
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