1968 must have been an interesting year for Elizabeth Taylor, having made back-to-back films with director Joseph Losey. Boom!, though filmed in 1967, was getting eviscerated by American critics while the next Taylor/Losey collaboration, Secret Ceremony, was in production. I wondered how that news may have affected the shoot of this film.
Given the vibe of the resulting film, and the nature of the material, it is hard to imagine it was a lively shoot to begin with. It opens with Taylor still in mourning for a daughter who drowned. Mia Farrow is a psychologically damaged woman-child who first encounters Taylor on the bus to the cemetery. Taylor is confronted by this stranger calling her “mommy”, and she is obviously repulsed. But then she realizes a need within her to nurture this younger woman as a sort of surrogate daughter.
Helping to convince Taylor to move in with Farrow is the young woman is very rich while the older is a prostitute of clearly limited means. Farrow leaves the other woman alone as she prepares breakfast for her, and this gives Taylor the opportunity to peruse such items as a display case containing solid gold coins. She actually bites a couple of them, something that I don’t know if it is a valid test for whether something is truly made of that metal, nor how one would know whether or not it passes the test. She must know, because one of them goes into her handbag.
Really, all the convincing Farrow would need to do is to prepare the resulting hardy breakfast she’s made, which Taylor promptly scarfs down. She even belches afterward, which was probably even more of a surprise to the audience than it was to Farrow. Then she settles down for a nap, with the younger woman remarking of her low-class pantyhose, “Where did you ever get such horrible stockings.” Eating and then a nap—it’s like Taylor is a street-wise Goldilocks who has still fallen into the traps of the house of the three bears.
Farrow will glare at Taylor when future deviations from expected behavior occur, such as an utterance of a very minor swear word. But Taylor very quickly, and quite thoroughly, assumes the role of pretending to be a woman she has not know before nor can ever fully know.
But she is protective of Farrow, directly confronting the girl’s aunts (Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown) by way of a deceased biological father, who visit only to torment the girl and secretly purloin items to sell in their antique shop. Taylor’s ruse in this scene is to play the dead mother’s previously unknown sister from America.
Robert Mitchum plays Farrow’s step-father, and he doesn’t even know he’s a widower, as he was away in the States when she died. He is wanted in that country for interfering with a minor. Now he has returned to resume interfering with his stepdaughter.
That is a deeply disturbing element of the plot, and Mitchum is shockingly effective at playing a cunning intellectual with monstrous appetites. Think John Huston in Chinatown. This may be the most effectively intimidating character I have seen him play, and I am including the original Cape Fear in that assessment.
Earlier, we had seen Farrow reenact in the kitchen the moment which resulted in Mitchum being exiled from the house. It is heart-rending to see her acting like somebody is grabbing her wrist and hurting her, and the absence of another person in the room gives the moment the quality of supernatural horror. Then we will later see her essentially reenacting this scene again, only with him there in the flesh.
Farrow is almost as creepy as Mitchum, but in a different way. For most of the runtime, I was on the fence as to whether she is truly delusional or if she is fully aware Taylor isn’t really her mother. Either way, she is severely damaged goods, and she likes to play weird and dangerous psychological games, of which I will disclose nothing here. It is interesting she came to this production fresh from Rosemary’s Baby, if only to see the contrast between the performances. There is one bit here where she is pretending to be pregnant and says all she wants to eat it a big hunk of meat, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a reference to that film.
Taylor is simply incredible in this picture. As usual, she completely throws herself into the role and…well, she has more of herself to throw than she did just a couple of years earlier. What is interesting is the actress’s self-awareness of increasing girth, yelling at a mirror at how fat she’s become. In later dialogue with Mitchum, he repeatedly calls her a cow. That had to be difficult for her to address directly in a film.
The house is the fourth main character in this picture, as it was shot almost entirely with the art nouveau masterpiece that is Debenham House. It is largely glazed tile in such decadent color combinations are gold and dark blue, with a two-story central corridor that seems to have every square inch covered in mosaics of tiny squares. If you recognize the location, it might be from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where it was in the brief scene where Katherine Helmond gets a consultation for plastic surgery.
I learned about that, and a great deal more, from Tim Lucas’s commentary which accompanies Secret Ceremony on the Kino Lorber blu-ray. If there is one aspect of Kino’s presentation which is unfortunate, it is image instability through large portions of the runtime. The image fluctuated up and down so much at times that it left me more nauseous than the uncomfortable themes of incest and shared delusions which drive the plot. I wonder how Farrow handled playing such a disturbed character and then I found myself musing whether she later recalled this film when Woody Allen was revealed to have inappropriate relations with their own children.
Dir: Joseph Losey
Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray