SECRET CEREMONY 1968, Universal,


104m 23s, £4.00, PAL DVD-2 By Kim Newman


Based on a short story that Marco Denevi adapted several times for Argentine and Span- ish television, this mystifying, underrated exercise in gothic dress-up and role-play and Old Dark House camp is a female- oriented counterpart to director Joseph Losey’s breakthrough film THE SERVANT (1963). In place of a male servant-and- master relationship, it has a mother-and-daughter axis... but psycho-drama still plays out in a cluttered London mansion which embodies the mental and physical decay of the ruling classes. THE SERVANT was shot in cool, Expressionist black-and-white by Douglas Slocombe; this offers gloomy color cinematography from Gerry Fisher, which prefigures his work on other mansion-set movies (MALPERTUIS, BLIND


TERROR). Production design by Richard Macdonald (SOME- THING WICKED THIS WAY COMES) and art direction by John Clark (who decorated the tonally similar PERFORMANCE) adds mod touches to the tradi- tional olde junke shoppe aes- thetic (magpie aunts actually raid the place for portable tat to sell in their antique shop). The striking location (Debenham House, Holland Park) was later used in CARRY ON EMMAN- NUELLE and THE WINGS OF THE DOVE.


It opens with what seems a meet-weird on the upper deck of a London bus between two strange women, but it emerges that they are already in the midst of an extended game. Earthy, mature Leonora (Eliza- beth Taylor) has descended into alcoholism and prostitution af- ter the death of her child (and the breakup of her marriage) but found a place in the orbit of frag- ile, infantile Cenci Englehard (Mia Farrow), who has managed


to get Leonora to take the place of her dead mother amid the funereal splendor of a house stuffed full of designer dresses and knick-knacks. Hannah (THE 39 STEPS’ Peggy Ashcroft) and Hilda (TALES OF HOFFMANN’s Pamela Brown), the dead mother’s sisters, occasionally visit to gos- sip, chide and steal—exploiting the enormously wealthy, appar- ently demented Cenci. The fam- ily money comes from her dead father Gustave, but a satyr- bearded, flower-presenting wicked stepfather is in the mix. Albert (Robert Mitchum, off his usual beat), a randy and per- haps pedophile academic, may have been an earlier partner in Cenci’s fantasies. He constitutes a leering, eccentric threat to the oddball idyll and also gets the funniest line: “I couldn’t rape a randy elephant. I’m much too tentative.” Like THE SERVANT—deliber- ately evoked as the women take a trip to the seaside and Losey pauses to overhear a snatch of


Mia Farrow as the mysterious woman-child who arrives as if to assume the place of...


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