Possibly the best dark comedy ever produced.
Added 10/14/2009
The Loved One is a rare instance in which a film surpasses the novel on which it was based. Evelyn Waugh's original novella was a sharp but spare social satire. The screenplay, written by Waugh's old friend Christopher Isherwood (Berlin Stories, I Am a Camera) and Terry Southern (Candy, Dr. Strangelove, The Magic Christian, etc.) is a rich, snappy mockery of Hollywood, the British in Hollywood, and the American Way of Death. Jonathan Winters gives a tour de force performance as the siblings Harry and Wilbur Glenworthy, one a studio hustler down on his luck and the other a cynical and megalomaniacal CEO of a bizarre mortuary/cemetary. Rod Steiger is superb as an effete embalmer, Robert Morse is an excellent casting choice as the bemused young British poet accidentally thrust into the bizarre world-within-world of the upper crust mortuary Whispering Glades. Numerous smaller roles and cameos by John Gielgud, Robert Morley, Liberace, James Coburn, Tab Hunter, Milton Berle enrich the film enormously. It's unpredictable, intelligent, hilarious, and devoid of jokes about bowel movements, a genre that seems to form the exoskeleton of all current comedies.
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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The Love One
Added 10/2/2009
One of those "classics" you just have to watch every once in a while to bring yourself back to reality and have a good belly laugh.
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The Loved One
Added 8/5/2009
This is a lost classic which should be revisited. It's entertaining, strange at times & just plain good. Have fun with this strange, complex movie.
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Monty Python, It's Not
Added 8/1/2009
"The Loved One" (1965) is a black and white rendering of Evelyn Waugh's 1948 novel about the death industry in Hollywood. Young Brit, Dennis Barlow (Robert Morse with strange moles near his lips), the protagonist, a cold-blooded, cynical, nasty, scuzzy little opportunist, turns up in L.A. and visits his uncle Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud) who has made big bucks working for a Hollywood studio. Hinsley: "Americans talk all the time, but they never expect you to listen."
The uncle gets fired by the studio, tops himself, and Morse is sent to arrange the funeral at Whispering Glades, a place like Forest Lawn where the statuary and grounds are luxurious and tasteless. No Jews or non-Caucasians are allowed.
The major players include Jonathan Winters playing two parts, Rod Steiger as the chief mortician Mr. Joyboy, and Robert Morley as head of the snobbish ex-pat Brit colony in Hollywood. Cameo performances by a number of stars enliven the movie: Liberace as an unctuous casket salesman, Tab Hunter, Milton Berle, Roddy McDowall, Dana Andrews, Lionel Stander as a newspaper advice columnist, etc.
The scene in which Joyboy is arranging the facial expressions on a dead Gielgud are hilarious. Steiger throughout turns in a brilliant performance, and Winters is merely over-the-top standard Winters. Anjanette Comer as Aimee adores her work as a cosmetician, is naïve and stupid as her love bounces between Joyboy and Dennis who pawns off famous poems on her that he has supposedly written. She is horrified when she finds out Dennis works for a pet cemetery which seems to mock her glorious workplace.
The movie is not as funny as it pretends to be, and I think, packing it with celebrities, was a way of covering up its flaws and weaknesses. Monty Python it's not. For its day, it was daring; for today it's somewhat blah. Jonathan Winters as the owner of Whispering Glades decides to turn it into a retirement home for seniors, but he has to find a way "to get the stiffs off my property."
The movie isn't as funny as it seemed when I first saw it in a theater years ago, and the Waugh novel itself is quite tame by today's standards. There are certain mean-spirited features to the film, and the scenes of Joyboy's obese gluttonous mother are merely gross. A section involving sending the remains up into space in rockets is tacked on and falls flat. The movie is a satire, a black comedy that seems to be making fun of the death industry in Hollywood, but I get the feeling the moviemakers (insiders) were also making fun of the movie's audience in a perverse way.
2 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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The Loved One
Added 4/22/2009
A film that was clearly made "just for fun".
Not a serious bone in its virtual body.
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