Secret Ceremony (1968)
Supernatural (Kino Lorber)
Supernatural (1933) is among the strangest “pre-Code” talking pictures made before the Hollywood Production Code imposed stricter censorship. Although known for comedies, Carol Lombard stars a seductress in the form of an heiress possessed by the spirit of a murderess.
The film opens with an unsettling montage (indebted to Soviet cinema), including lurid headlines on “Artist-Slayer” Ruth Rogen and her “riotous orgy in a Greenwich Village apartment.” She’s sent to the electric chair but an esteemed psychologist experiments on her body, searching for evidence of survival of the psyche after physical death. Her spirit escapes and inhabits the heiress’ body. Mixed up in all this is a fraudulent medium faking levitations and apparitions of the dead at his seances. He’s after the heiress’ money and doesn’t know that Ruth’s spirit is after him.
Supernatural was unusual for Hollywood in those years for both debunking and acknowledging the shadowlands of the occult.
Secret Ceremony (Kino Lorber)
They’re both lost, the middle-aged prostitute Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) and the young heiress (Mia Farrow). Although Cenci is 22, her emotional development was arrested around age 12. She can’t accept the death of her mother and in her delusional state, adopts Leonora is her mom. Leonora is willing to play along—she has nowhere to go and besides, intensely Roman Catholic, perhaps she perceives a glimmer of possible redemption?
Directed by Joseph Losey, blacklisted by Hollywood during the McCarthy era and in English exile, Secret Ceremony (1968) is at first frustratingly enigmatic but grows intriguing as lines begin to connect the plot points. The film has the character of a psychologically intense stage play with the visual advantage of multiple camera angles. Robert Mitchum plays Cenci’s stepfather, a pedophile professor rationalizing “the extraordinary purity of my longings.” Cenci’s empty pre-Raphaelite mansion, vast and impractical, is the fourth major character.
