Secret Ceremony displays Mia Farrow's excellent portrayal of madness. In fact, her portrayal seems to come so easily to her we were wondering about her own sanity. She plays emotionally disturbed almost too well. Elizabeth Taylor at times may have wondered just what she got herself into by accepting this role. It's even stranger than Reflections in a Golden Eye. She at least uses some restraint and knows her character well. Still, despite the idea that an emotionally disturbed Mia could be helped by a mother figure strongly resembling her own birth mother and despite the fact that actress' both contribute a lot to their roles, there isn't really anything that deep happening here. If anything, the story never becomes too informative. We are given the basics and it never progress' beyond that. What happened to the birth mother? What was the relationship about between the mother and daughter? What is the true role of Robert Mitchum's character? We don't really get anything too descriptive and for that the film just becomes another soapy melodrama with some odd characters. What it really needs is to dig deep and give us more information and we only get small bits and pieces. Despite the odd story, nothing too profound here.

Joseph Losey who had blacklist troubles in the USA, came over to the UK and did such great films as The Servant and King & Country. But he came up short with Secret Ceremony of which I still am trying to figure out just what was happening.Elizabeth Taylor plays an aging prostitute for whom Mia Farrow gets fixated on, thinking Liz is her mother. Since Liz lost a child herself that works out well because the two at first fill a symbiotic need for family. And as Mia is one wealthy heiress Liz is thinking she's hit the jackpot.There are some dissenters however. Two of whom are aunts Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown. To them Taylor says she's the American cousin of Mia's mom. Then there is the sinister Robert Mitchum who replete with beard that makes him look like a leprechaun on weed, who is her estranged stepdad. He knows there ain't no American cousin. And Mitchum is a big part of the cause of Mia's psychosis. According to Lee Server's fine book on Robert Mitchum, old rumple eyes got the part on the recommendation of Roddy McDowell to his friend Liz Taylor. It only involved a few scenes for Mitchum who sauntered through the part rather indifferently. Part of the reason he got it was Mitchum's uncanny ear for dialect and he goes in and out of an English accent which was proof positive of his indifference to the film. What he did enjoy was the company of Liz Taylor and her roistering husband Richard Burton. Those were two legendary drinkers, Mitchum and Burton and they really enjoyed night after night seeing who could drink who under.Secret Ceremony will never rate on the top of any of the three main players film resume. Nor will director Joseph Losey be acclaimed for this one in the future.

One has to be in the right mood to accept this unusual, moody psychological drama. Taylor plays a low-rent prostitute who still mourns the death of her young daughter. Farrow plays a disturbed, flaky young lady who is having trouble reconciling the recent death of her own mother. Farrow bears a passing resemblance to Taylor's deceased daughter while Taylor is a dead ringer for Farrow's mom. One day, these two meet on a bus and then again at a grave site and strike up a sort of unwritten, even unspoken, agreement that Taylor will assume the identity of Farrow's mother. Taylor can hardly believe her good fortune as the woman was wealthy, lived in a spacious house full of antiques and enjoyed a closet full of designer clothes and luxurious furs. The fun doesn't last too long, however, when Farrow's two meddling aunts (Ashcroft and Brown) stop by to loot the place, followed by the arrival of Farrow's lascivious step-dad Mitchum, who is always on the go, evading the fallout from his many instances of molestation and statutory rape. Things become more and more complicated until death and violence ensues. Taylor, in one of her floundering periods as an actress and looking thick and matronly through much of the picture, gives an uneven and in-cohesive performance. She's always been interesting to watch, even when bad, but this character lacks focus and motivation. This is not helped by the fractured means of storytelling and the spotty screenplay. She is, at times, unintentionally hilarious as she flops around and brays over various things, frequently in cheap-looking, tacky costumes (none so bad as a loud, purple patterned dress with white go-go boots.) She does have one high-glam scene near the end in which she's decked out in pink chiffon with embroidered flowers and a massive Alexandre of Paris hairdo. Watch her woof down a huge longshoreman's breakfast in the blink of an eye! Farrow, while not particularly likable or accessible, at least gives a very strong performance in a challenging part. Her dementia and manipulativeness is excellently presented. Mitchum is all wrong for his role. His accent (or lack there of) wavers hideously and he never seems like someone who would have been wife to Taylor and step-father to Farrow. Most of his acting in the film is atrocious though he begins to rise to the occasion in a heated beach scene with Taylor. Very welcome and solid support is given by Ashcroft and Brown as the vaguely dykish sisters with sticky fingers and selfish hearts. The film has some sordid aspects to it, though it stays reasonably smut-free. Farrow refused to film her big love scene with Mitchum, so it was cut and note how a convenient (and gargantuan) sponge is always floating in front of Taylor in her bathtub scene. It has definite curiosity value and features interesting settings and situations, but it's also challenging to get through and unclear at times. Perhaps multiple viewings will help. The hacked-up TV version should be avoided entirely.

**SPOILERS** Psychological drama that has to do with two women who can't bring themselves to accept the deaths or a loved one and go into a mutual fantasy existence playing the parts of the persons that each of them grieve for. Cenci, Mia Farrow, has never got over the death of her mother who after suffering for some three years from an unknown or unnamed illness finally killed herself by downing an entire bottle of sleeping pills.Spoting this woman on a city bus who looks a lot like her deceased mother Cenci becomes so infatuated with her that she follows the women into a local Catholic Church where she goes to confession. After trying to get away from the pesky young girl the woman whom we later find out to be a street hooker named Leonora Garbowski, Elizabeth Taylor, gives into Cenci's fantasies of being her dead mother. So that instead of spending her life in cheap flea bag hotel rooms she can have a decent place to live, Cenci's huge Gothic mansion. At the same time Leonora starts to fantasize herself about Cenci being her daughter Judith who died or disappeared five years ago at the age of 10.Everything couldn't be better for the two women who feed of each others tragedies by trying to outdo themselves in who suffered the most until Cenci's step-father Albert, Robert Mitchum,shows up unexpectedly from the US. Albert a Philadelphia college professor is also somewhat of a sexual psycho who despite his strange vow, only to himself, of being celibate is at the same time sexually attracted to young girls, some as young as 10 years old. this attraction had him always on the run, or one step ahead, from the law during his entire time in the states. Albert shows up at the mansion sporting this atrocious leprechaun beard that even he's embarrassed with, did he need it to disguise himself from the cops looking for him. Thankfully he has it shaved off after five or so minutes of screen time.With Lenora knowing that her charade of being Cenci's mother is about to be exposed, by step-father Albert, she goes to stay at a fancy waterfront,on the English channel, hotel until Albert leaves. Lenora is then confronted with Cenci's mental deterioration where she becomes even more stranger and off-the-wall then she already was in the movie. Faking that Albert raped her and then, in what seems like a few days later, making believe that she's some eight months pregnant has Leonora completely lose it. In the conflict between the two unstable women Cenci finally realizes that she's, Lorona, not her mother and in effect attempts to kill herself like her real mother did with a bottle full of sleeping pills!Everything goes to pot for poor Cenci as she in effect throws Leonora out of her house only to ask her back moments later and then succumbs from the effects of her swallowing the sleeping pills overdosing and dying from them. Albert who for all the bad things in the movie that's said about him is really a somewhat decent guy, especially after he shaved off that silly beard he was wearing. Albert never as much as made, it must have taken everything that he had in him, a real sexual move on Ceni ends up with a knife in his gut courtesy of Lorona at Cenci's funeral as the movie "Secret Ceremony" finally comes to an end.Very strange movie that has it's high as well as low moments with one of them, the highs, having Elizabeth Taylor for once looking really sexy. That beach scene with her wearing a low-cut dress is a real turn on where she's as hot as she was in "The Sandpiper" back in 1964 with her husband actor Richard Burton.