Studio: Universal Pictures
Running time: 109 minutes
Secret Ceremony (1968)
“Academy Award winner Elizabeth Taylor headlines the cast of this superb, deeply moving psychodrama. Secret Ceremony is a dark journey, a mélange of mental illness and deception. Cenci (Mia Farrow), a wealthy, psychotic waif fixates on Leonora (Taylor), a prostitute who strongly resembles the girl’s dead mother. She eventually entices Leonora to her large, comfortable home and begins addressing her as ‘mummy.’ Maternal feelings, sympathy for this lost girl, and the prospect of luxurious living such as she has never known convince Leonora to adopt the role of Cenci’s mother. Soon, however, lines begin to blur and their relationship becomes far more complex.
“When Cenci’s bitter, spinster aunts, Hannah (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) and Hilda (Pamela Brown) come to call, Leonora discovers that Cenci is not the teenager she’d originally thought. She’s actually in her early 20s but merely seems so much younger. In Aunt Hannah’s words, ‘Crazy people never look their age.’ Then Cenci’s stepfather, Albert (Robert Mitchum), returns from America and Leonora learns more about Cenci than she ever wanted to know.” [From the VHS]
Cast
Leonora: Elizabeth Taylor
Cenci: Mia Farrow
Albert: Robert Mitchum
Aunt Hilda: Pamela Brown
Aunt Hannah: Peggy Ashcroft
And in extra footage added for the TV version:
Dr. Walter Stevens: Michael Strong
Sir Alex Gordon: Robert Douglas
Crew
Director: Joseph Losey
Producers: John Heyman and Norman Priggen
Screenwriter: George Tabori
Based on a Short Story by: Marco Denevi
Cinematographer: Gerald Fisher
Production Designer: Richard MacDonald
Art Director: John Clark
Set Decorator: Jill Oxley
Musical Score: Richard Rodney Bennett
Editor: Reginald Beck
Miss Taylor’s Wardrobe: Marc Bohan and Christian Dior
Costumes: Susan Yelland
Miss Taylor’s Hairstyles: Alexandre of Paris
Did You Know?
In her 1997 memoir, Farrow recalled working with Elizabeth on the film. “At the start I was in awe of Elizabeth—I’d seen every film she’d made since National Velvet. Now, working with her, I experienced her legendary loyalty, her generosity, and her down-to-earth humor.”
“Without fail, Elizabeth saw to it that I was invited to lunch and any other event she thought I might enjoy. ‘I feel protective of you,’ she recently told me. ‘I always have.’”
Mia Farrow later revealed the trouble she went through with her tresses to ensure a resemblance between her and Elizabeth in Secret Ceremony: “The movie people dyed my hair soot black, hoping to create any slight resemblance between myself and ravishing, raven-haired Elizabeth Taylor. When that failed to do it, I wore a long dark wig.”
As a workaround to the British animal quarantine laws, the Burtons, at a cost of $20,000 per month, chartered a yacht named the Beatriz of Bolivia, which they anchored at Tower Pier on the River Thames in London, to house their dogs while Elizabeth filmed Secret Ceremony and Richard made Where Eagles Dare (1968). Their own newly purchased yacht, the Kalizma, was being refitted.
Secret Ceremony’s taboo subject matter made it impossible for the film to be broadcast in its original form when it eventually aired on NBC TV in the United States in 1971. The film was butchered and bookended with a new prologue and epilogue—filmed without the involvement of director Joseph Losey. Jerry Vermilye outlines the changes in his book, The Films of Elizabeth Taylor:
“Secret Ceremony was considerably doctored for TV. Miss Taylor, it was decided, must not be thought of as any kind of streetwalker! Instead, the narrative explained that she was an aging wig model, no less, employed by a London department store. Further worried about the film’s ambiguities, especially after the necessary scissoring of sex and violence for the ‘tube,’ Universal’s executives added footage filmed with Robert Douglas and Michael Strong (not filmed by Losey) portraying, respectively, an attorney and a psychiatrist, whose conversations might serve to explain such newly added plot devices as Miss Taylor’s (off-screen) arrest for Mitchum’s murder, and a few other pat storyline conclusions not necessarily contained in George Tabori’s original screenplay. Also, an out-take of Taylor’s confession to a priest was reinserted, with the voice-over of her confession carrying into a subsequent scene. Among the deletions for TV were seminude bathing and massaging scenes that suggested a Lesbian relationship between Farrow and Taylor and implications of Mitchum's being a child-molester.”
The prologue and epilogue with Douglas and Strong were included as special features on Indicator’s Blu-ray release of Secret Ceremony.
