From the time she made ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) up through the late seventies, Mia Farrow was the go-to actress if you wanted imperiled fragility with a nymphet sex appeal. With her delicate porcelain beauty and flower child navieté which allowed her to play years younger than her real age, she could immediately engage any audience’s sympathy by her seemingly innocent nature. That’s why it seemed almost an act of cruelty for filmmakers to cast her in movies like SEE NO EVIL (1971, released in England as Blind Terror), which airs on TCM on Monday, September 28th at 11:45 pm ET, or the unsettling supernatural thriller, THE HAUNTING OF JULIA (1977, released in England as Full Circle), or the little rich girl gone quietly mad in SECRET CEREMONY (1969)..      

But if ROSEMARY’S BABY set the pattern with its worst cinematic pregnancy on record, Mia certainly didn’t shy away from similarly offbeat roles mixed in with more innocuous commercial choices such as John and Mary (1969), the made-for-TV drama Goodbye, Raggedy Ann (1971) and The Public Eye (1972, aka Follow Me! in England). Maybe it was her divorce from Frank Sinatra in 1968 – the final straw was when she opted to make the Roman Polanski thriller over co-starring with her husband in The Detective – that gave her a new found sense of freedom in her career. But there is an unavoidable sense of masochism and perversity on display in such films as SECRET CEREMONY (1969), directed by Joseph Losey, and SEE NO EVIL that earned her a special bumper sticker in the early seventies. 

Modeled on the iconic POW/MIA posters and stickers which were everywhere in the waning days of the Viet Nam conflict, “M.I.A. Farrow Never Has a Nice Day” popped up briefly on some jokesters’ cars during this time and considering some of her film choices, it wasn’t far from the truth.

Her victimization in ROSEMARY’S BABY is well documented – raped by Satan, manipulated by witches, betrayed by everyone – and in her following film, SECRET CEREMONY, she plays a similarly traumatized creature though most of the abuse and suffering has already taken place when the movie opens. The film’s true meaning is open to debate but here is what it seems to be about on the surface – Cenci, a strange, waif-like girl who lives all alone in a huge, sprawling mansion invites a destitute and grieving woman (Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora) to live with her because she resembles her dead mother. And Leonora accepts because Cenci also bears a striking resemblance to her recently deceased daughter. A most peculiar relationship develops from there – the bathtub fight over a rubber ducky is particularly wacko and so is Cenci’s fake-pregnancy disguise – and becomes increasingly sinister with the arrival of Cenci’s stepfather, Albert (Robert Mitchum), who sexually abused Cenci in the past. It’s hard to get a bead on Cenci throughout. She is often infantile in manner and behavior  but is also a little bit creepy as well in her long, dark wig, flashing secret smiles or catatonic shock.

Mixed in is a subplot involving Cenci’s eccentric aunts, Hilda (Pamela Brown) and Hannah (Peggy Ashcroft), who are after her inheritance. Before the whole thing ends on a downbeat note with a final act of retribution, Cenci, Leonora and Albert enact a dark tale of madness, suicide and murder.

SECRET CEREMONY is an unheralded art film, however, compared with the blunt, vulgar manipulation of SEE NO EVIL. In case you don’t know the premise, it’s another variation on the Wait Until Dark formula that follows the trials and tribulations of Sarah, a recently blinded young woman who is stalked by a homicidal nutcase after escaping his initial slaughter. When I first saw the film in 1971, I actually thought it was suspenseful and occasionally frightening but a recent viewing was entertaining for all the wrong reasons, most of it centering around the outrageous chutes-and-ladders treatment of Mia and the ham-fisted directorial choices of Richard Fleischer, who once made several first-rate B thrillers (Armored Car Robbery [1950], The Narrow Margin (1952), Violent Saturday [1955]). What happened to him here? The zoom lens for one thing. It’s like he just discovered it and the overuse of that technique here becomes painful to behold after awhile, not to mention the fact that it leads the audience by the nose, constantly killing any potential suspense. Mario Bava was guilty of zoom lens excess too in the seventies but Fleischer trumps him with other visual abuses in SEE NO EVIL such as the depiction of the maniacal killer throughout the movie as a pair of cowboy boots (always photographed from floor level). Strangely enough, “The Boots” give a performance to some degree. They walk, run, react to being splashed with water, wipe themselves off on the pants legs repeatedly and display twitchy nervousness at times. But almost every appearance by “The Boots” is more likely to inspire howls of derision now. Was this ever scary? And none of it is helped by Elmer Bernstein’s inappropriately brassy, funk-influenced score with occasional bursts of lush orchestrations. Fleisher’s attempt to provide some motivation for the killer or even a thumbnail psychological profile has the subtety of a two-by-four over the head. We first see “The Boots” leaving a fictitious double feature of “The Convent Murders” and “Rapist Cult.” “The Boots” then makes stops at a gun store, a newstand for some violent/pornographical reading material and a strip joint. So I guess modern society is to blame. Ho-hum. When we finally get a look at the killer at the climax, he’s a non-entity – someone who was barely glimpsed on-screen earlier – which further exposes the film’s cheap shot nature.

There are so many other things wrong with SEE NO EVIL such as implausible behavior (the killer spends the night at the scene of his crime even though other people are about), horror film cliches (doors blown open or shut by the wind), and the absurd multitude of red herrings. Everyone except Sarah appears to be a likely suspect such as a misanthropic stablehand who prefers animals to people. An unidentified man is shown spying on Sarah’s house from behind a hedge and then flees as a car approaches. Then there is that suspicious camp of gypsies in the woods not far from the scene of the murders. Gypsies in the English countryside in 1971? Even Sarah’s ex-boyfriend Steve could be the culprit; isn’t he just a little too solicitous towards her?

It’s all shamelessly manipulative but dumb fun regardless. Yet, the most effective part of the film is Mia Farrow’s performance as our damsel-in-distress and she really deserves a better film but makes SEE NO EVIL compelling nonetheless on some primeval level.  Admittedly it’s not for everyone and at times is so gleefully sadistic that the travails of Sarah began to seem like some sick joke concocted by Saturday Night Live’s Walter Williams, the creator of Mister Bill. Sarah could be the female version. See pretty little Sarah run through the house barefoot. Watch out, there’s a big piece of jagged glass on the floor. OHHH NOOOOOOOO!  

The punishment Farrow endures throughout SEE NO EVIL might be actually worse than a real POW since she’s coping with blindness on top of everything else. In the course of 85 minutes, she runs into furniture, is viciously slapped by a gypsy and abducted and imprisoned in a shed by another, falls down a steep embankment, wallows in mucky red clay, gets scratched by tree branches in a frantic run through the forest, and is almost drown in a bathtub by the murderer. When she is finally rescued, she is found banging car parts against each other in an isolated junkyard, hoping to be heard. It’s a haunting, surreal image. In fact, a great deal of SEE NO EVIL is gorgeous to behold – except for those excessive zoom lens shots – with the atmospheric Fall colors of the English countryside adding a melancholy caste to everything.

SEE NO EVIL is easily the most masochistic of Farrow’s films during this period but other oddball roles would follow:

The buck-toothed, legbrace-wearing wife of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Claude Chabrol’s rarely seen misogynist comedy of manners, DOCTEUR POPAUL (1972, aka High Heels)

The peculiar, possibly demented party guest in Robert Altman’s A WEDDING (1978)

The grieving mother of a recently deceased child in the underrated ghost story FULL CIRCLE (1977, released in the US as The Haunting of Julia)

And the jeopardized ski tourist in Corey Allen’s tacky disaster epic, AVALANCHE (1978), co-produced by Roger Corman. Her career took a completely different path when she met Woody Allen, beginning with A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SEX COMEDY in 1982 but that’s another story and another blog.

Below is a YouTube clip from SEE NO EVIL.