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Simply Perfect

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The major talents involved with this movie -- director Joseph Losey and actors Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow, have done some great work and some lousy work -- Mitchum was inclined to phone in performances unless he got interested. But, like many people who get involved with the arts, when they were doing something on the edge, they doubtless knew they could fail -- but a lot of the people here seem to fall into the common fallacy that great talent can never fail -- as if DONOVAN'S REEF is a great film because it was directed by John Ford or A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG was a laugh riot because it was directed by Chaplin. Or that every performance given by Paul Newman was great. Sometimes people make mistakes and the greater the genius, the greater the mistakes.About the only good thing I can say about this movie is that the camera work by Gerry Fisher is excellent and occasionally distracting. After that, everything bogs down because of the idiotic, minimalist story in which nothing is ever really explained -- but the plot is that psycho Mia Farrow's mother has just died so she falls in with psycho hooker Elizabeth Taylor, whose daughter has just died, until psycho step-daddy Bob Mitchum, in a hideous beard and sporting an accent that varies form Irish to Australian to his basic accent, discourses on statutory rape.That's very little to build a hundred-minute movie on and, despite everyone -- except possibly for Mitchum -- doing their best, there are long periods of nothing. Some might look upon these as meditative sequences. I find them boring.So what is the result? You have characters you don't care about doing very little of interest in a cluttered world -- I suspect the set decorator was getting a kickback from prop suppliers -- and the question arises why this was released at all. Answer: because some people would go to see it based on the track record of the major talent involved and even if the project would not show a profit, at least the loss would be ameliorated.... and forty years later some money is still being picked up by showing it on cable TV.

Secret Ceremony has an excellent central cast in Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum, but unfortunately it really misses out in the most important area; that being the story, as while the film features a handful of interesting themes and ideas, it never really seems to know what it wants to be and this results in a film that just feels completely pointless and thus will leave most viewers feeling cold. The film is based on a short story by Marco Denevi and primarily focuses on the idea of how people handle great loss. We focus on a young girl named Cenci, who prowls the streets since the death of her mother. She's looking for a woman to call her mother and finds that in look-alike Leonora, a prostitute who, coincidently, just happens to have lost her daughter also. Cenci takes Leonora back to her house and while it soon becomes apparent that Cenci is a few cards short of a full deck; the pair soon form a strange and playful mother and daughter bond. Things are going quite well for the pair until Cenci's stepfather, Albert, turns up...The source material is a short story, and at over a hundred minutes; I wouldn't call Secret Ceremony a short film, which largely seems to be one of the problems. Director Joseph Losey (who previously made the underrated Hammer Horror classic The Damned) gives the story too much time and since there isn't actually a lot of ideas; the film does soon start to drone on. The only real saving grace is the performances. Elizabeth Taylor gives a strong leading performance as always and manages to keep things at least slightly interesting. Mia Farrow is also good; although not as good as she was for Roman Polanski in the same year in the masterpiece Rosemary's Baby. It's a different and challenging role, however, and it gives the actress a chance to show her range. The real standout is Robert Mitchum as the detestable stepfather - he plays up to the role brilliantly. It becomes obvious very early on in the film that there's not going to be a point made at the end; and unfortunately, the film delivers on that promise. Overall, there really isn't many reasons to bother with this film; and I don't recommend anyone goes out of their way to find it.

I have been an admirer of Joseph Losey's films for many years, but if they are going to show this clunker, why not dust off the far superior Accident, which starred a pre Cabaret Michael York, as well as Stanley Baker and Vivian Merchant? Although not THE most awful film I have ever seen, this film plays as a ridiculous parody. Once again Elizabeth Taylor plays a hooker, and an over the hill one at that! Mia Farrow decked out in a ridiculously top heavy black wig acts the demented waif. Robert Mitchum must have needed the money. Miss Taylor does not miss an opportunity to pose with furs and flimsy negligee, presumably to cover up her limited acting talent. Every time she opens her mouth and that strident quaver comes out I want to switch off and pick up a book. Did no one ever give the woman voice lessons? The only thing going for this film is the splendid art direction. The film was worth watching just for the lovely stained glass throughout the house.

**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.