THE CEREMONY

Laurence Harvey

THE CEREMONY (1963). Produced and directed by Laurence Harvey. NOTE: Some plot points are revealed in this review.

In Tangier Sean McKenna (Laurence Harvey of Butterfield 8) is being held in prison and and is being prepped for execution. McKenna participated in a bank robbery in which a guard was killed, although he did not fire the shot and apparently tried to stop it. The warden (John Ireland of No Place to Land) and prosecutor (Ross Martin) want McKenna to tell them where the money is, but he refuses. Meanwhile his brother, Dominic (Robert Walker Jr.),  hatches a plot to spring Sean from prison by replacing Father O'Brien (Jack MacGowran) when he comes to give Sean the last rites. But Sean doesn't realize that he must pay a price for his brother's assistance, a price that concerns Sean's girlfriend, Catherine (Sarah Miles).

Sarah Miles and Laurence Harvey

Produced and directed by and starring Laurence Harvey, The Ceremony is, sadly, a mess. What might have been a thrilling picture -- and it does have a couple of exciting sequences -- has been turned into a pretentious allegory, a painfully obvious anti-capital punishment tract whose one-dimensional characters fail to get a grip on the audience. We learn so little about Sean that it's hard to have any sympathy for a bank robber, and since -- whoever fired the shot -- the guard was killed during the commission of a robbery, it's hard to understand why one of the prison staff is so upset at the thought of his demise -- in a completely ridiculous scene all the members of the firing squad refuse to shoot him (or at least the person they think it is). 

John Ireland and Ross Martin

Harvey gives a decent but not great performance. Poor Ross Martin, generally a fine actor, is forced to play the cliche of the "evil" prosecutor who takes extreme pleasure in someone being executed -- he never even comes off as a real person. John Ireland does what he can with another underwritten role, that of the prison warden. Jack MacGowran is incredibly irritating as the fussy and dithering priest who seems half-senile and who continuously talks to himself while saying nothing remotely interesting. Sarah Miles does her best but is unable to bring Catherine, torn between two brothers, to believable life. Lee Patterson [Spin a Dark Web], who appears briefly as a friend of Sean's and Dominick's who helps the former escape, is relatively unscathed. The sensitive, uncredited young actor who plays the prison guard disturbed at the thought of Sean being executed probably comes off best, although his character is also undeveloped. 

Verdict: Interesting cast in rather dull movie sunk by its own pretensions. **.