It's hard to find words to describe Secret Ceremony. It's definitely a film that you'd be surprised the likes of Taylor, Farrow, and Mitchum would be interested in being a part of, but their commitment to the material is admirable.

Taylor plays a homeless who has a chance encounter with a creepy young woman played by Farrow who stalks her because she reminds her of her dead mother. Luckily for Farrow, she reminds Taylor of her dead daughter and the two start living together in Farrow's mansion. Needless to say, things just keep getting creepier from there.

The big issue with this film is that we don't know Taylor's character well enough to figure out why she'd ever been desperate or crazy enough to go off and live with a complete stranger, especially one as creepy and obviously disturbed as Farrow. This weak motivation makes everything that happens after it feel unearned and, frankly, boring.

There are some interesting and creepy ideas sprinkled throughout including a dollop, but it's not as interesting as it could have been.

Whatever one may say about it - obscure (and obscurely-titled), deliberately-paced and exasperating - there's no denying the hold the film has on receptive viewers. Not quite in the same league as Losey's THE SERVANT (1963) or ACCIDENT (1967), similarly compulsive - and vague - examinations of relationships (though some may disagree, given that Leonard Maltin rates it ***1/2 while the www.cultmovies.info website even goes all the way and awards it ****!), but it's certainly a film which should have received greater exposure over time; I only know of one late-night broadcast on Italian TV some years back, which I had missed.

Needless to say, this is a dialogue-driven film (though the audio on Universal's no-frills R2 DVD comes off muffled on occasion) and George Tabori's adult script provides many a juicy line for the actors (particularly Robert Mitchum) to sink their teeth in. Not surprisingly, the film features quite a bit of mirror imagery - which is in keeping with the prevalent doppelganger theme. There is, however, an unusual emphasis on religion: Taylor is a devout churchgoer (despite being, ostensibly, a streetwalker!) and often takes recourse in praying.

Elizabeth Taylor was at her artistic peak during this time (resulting in one of her most controlled and less annoying performances) - though her real-life obsession with fashionable clothes and elaborate hairstyles proves a distraction alongside the psychological analysis (on the lines of Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA [1966]) the director is striving for! Mia Farrow as Taylor's surrogate child-like daughter is no less impressive here than her astonishing turn in ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968). Mitchum's role - which has a dash of CAPE FEAR (1962) in it - is arguably the most unusual he's ever played (even more so than his unforgettable mad preacher in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER [1955], in my opinion!) and, while I'd be interested to know what he really thought about the whole thing, his leering and abusive (verbally to Taylor and physically to Farrow) interloper certainly lends the film an added charge of tension - not to mention another possible mode of interpretation! Pamela Brown and Peggy Aschroft are Farrow's elderly eccentric aunts - unacknowledged by the family (being related to Taylor's deceased first husband, whom they idolize), they have resorted to kleptomania on their rare visits to the mansion!

A couple of confrontation scenes - between Taylor and the greedy relatives and, later, between Mitchum and Taylor at the holiday resort - are very well-handled and emerge as highpoints of the film. Ditto for the sequence in which Farrow goes bonkers when left alone in the house, bringing to mind the Catherine Deneuve of REPULSION (1965); her death scene, then - calling inaudibly for help after the departing Taylor - is equally harrowing. In this respect, Gerry Fisher's velvety cinematography, Richard Rodney Bennett's delicate yet playful score and Richard MacDonald's artful production design (though, thankfully, Reginald Beck's editing is more or less straight-forward - as it could easily have gone the way of the fragmented style of film-making championed by the likes of Richard Lester and Nicolas Roeg, then coming into fashion!) are the perfect partners in the consummation of Losey's distinctive vision on the screen.

There is, of course, a clue in the name of the character played by Mia Farrow but how many Joe Publics did the producers expect to be hip to the rarely performed five-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelly or the story on which it was based. On the other hand those same producers do appear to be targeting a pretty hip audience; for example practically every comment posted here refers to the Liz Taylor character as a prostitute yet in the version I watched there is no mention, visible evidence, or even a hint of whether or not she even has any kind of job nor any explanation of why she allows herself to be picked up by Mia Farrow or why she is apparently free to abandon her home indefinitely. In short it's the kind of film where the audience must take this kind of sloppiness plus the odd snatch of Pinteresque non sequiter punctuated dialogue in its stride. On the plus side the acting is excellent as is the camera work.