Cinema: Grave Effrontery

The Loved One, copiously advertised as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone,” is an overstuffed sick joke trying to make the grade as a capital offense. Beneath the comedy’s excesses lie the bones of Novelist Evelyn Waugh’s slight, graceful satire of love and death in southern California. The hero is still a bumptious English poet (Robert Morse) employed at the Hap pier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. He woos a corpse cosmetician named Aimee Thanatogenos (Anjanette Comer), who is beloved by her boss, Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger), the chief mortician at Whispering Glades memorial park. Ultimately disillusioned in love, Aimee commits suicide by injection, apparently embalming herself at the same time.

Under the anything-goes direction of England’s Tony Richardson (Tom Jones), Loved One tosses so many wreaths into the nether world of American funeral customs that it occasionally scores a dead ringer. That chrome-plated butterball, Liberace, is hilariously on key as a casket salesman, peddling such optional extras as the standard-eternal or perpetual-eternal flames (“The standard burns only during visiting hours”). Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton enliven one interlude as a married pair squabbling over the remains of their dear departed, a dog named Arthur. Jonathan Winters succeeds outrageously as the mastermind of Whispering Glades, who wants to “get those stiffs off my property” and transform his real estate into a haven for senior citizens. His brainstorm (“Resurrection—Now!”): disinter the cadavers and, beginning with a dead astronaut, fire them into eternal orbit.

The rest of the film is equally far-out but seldom funny. Obviously enamored of Dr. Strangelove, Scenarists Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern (also co-scenarist of Strangelove) commit the funereal folly of thinking that any joke about death is worth repeating To cremate a pet cheerfully, embalm a baby, or mold crazy expressions onto the face of a corpse (John Gielgud, for example) may be good for laughs among professional crapehangers, but on a giant screen such gags seem merely gratuitous.

Having vulgarized Waugh, Director Richardson and his associates flail away at momism, nepotism, space-age technology, dirty old men, antiSemitism, anything. They treat the audience to a series of small, distasteful shocks, but as black comedy gives way to bald effrontery, even the shock wears off The Loved One seems as crude and pointless as a schoolboy’s Halloween prank like tipping over tombstones or throwing a stink bomb into the parsonage.