The Loved One

There are few films I can recommend this highly. Morse is memorable as the hapless Englishman, trying to understand this peculiar American commercial funeral institution and the nearly fanatical devotees to the Jonathan Winters' Blessed Reverend.

The tawdry nature of the corporate funeral industry gradually unfolds in this fantastic study of our fixation with marketing everything, even death.

Jonathan Winters, Rod Steiger is brilliant as Mr. Joyboy, the effete chief embalmer, and the film features such huge talent as John Gielgud and Robert Morley as well as a cameos by Milton Berle, Roddy McDowell, Tab Hunter, and Liberace as the smarmy casket salesman. Look for a very young Paul Williams and...is that James Coburn? Yes, yes it is.

Be advised that there are some dubbing and sound issues common to films of this era, but if you're more concerned with a/v than story and humor, you should be off looking at...I dunno, something from George Lucas.

This film's greatest flaw is that it's hard to find on VHS and doesn't exist on the DVD.

If you thought that funeral homes could only make for grim plots in movies, then you've got a real surprise coming! "The Loved One" portrays a young Brit Dennis Barlow (Robert Morse) coming to the Los Angeles and getting involved in a funeral parlor, with some very zany results. It's the sort of wacky humor that pervaded comedy flicks in the 1960s, right down to the giant cast (aside from Robert Morse, there's Jonathan Winters, Anjanette Comer, Dana Andrews, Milton Berle, James Coburn, John Gielgud, Tab Hunter, Liberace, Roddy McDowall, Robert Morley, Lionel Stander and Rod Steiger).

Anyway, this movie really does have something to offend everyone. Goofy but lovable, it's not to be missed.

It is hard to place any kind of meaningful description to this film because it takes cultural, social, and moral ideals and stomps on them. Additionally, the casting of the film goes against type, with Jonathan Winters, for example, as a dark, imposing religious force. The acting is superb, intense and, at times, intentionally campy and over-the-top. Each scene seems outrageous and, at times, ridiculous but inexorably moves the characters, and the audience, to a lip-biting conclusion.

Terry Southern, one of the credited screen writers, was also responsible for Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, Barbarella, Candy, Easy Rider, The Magic Christian, and many other wacky films. Knowing this may help to place it in some familiar context. Of all his films, though, this is the darkest.

If you are disturbed or offended by the funeral business, death in general, dead pets, or slightly veiled hints at necrophilia then you might want to give this one a miss. If you're brave and open-minded, however, I highly recommend this truly strange and wonderful film.

Having seen a Playboy magazine article on the making of the film, this 15 year-old had to see it to believe it. This was in Boston, and the theater chain (Sack) had lopped off considerable footage, but I never knew of this until a PBS showing of it years later revealed a scene with the astronaut's wife that, after having seen the movie so many times that I could recite it, caught me completely by surprise. I skipped school and sat for an entire day in the glory of this perverted beauty. I received a book on the making of the Loved One, and discovered that there was a whole batch of stars, such as Ruth Gordon, who never made it to the final cut. But with or without, this one packs one hell of a punch - a scathing indictment of the '60s and all that it beheld, from a Jackie Kennedy look-alike in the opening scenes to that wonderful orgy in the casket filled chamber. Look close for a quick Jami Farr changing a portrait of The Queen at the luncheon held at the Brit exile's club. This is my all-time favorite movie, bar none.

Several of you youngsters have added comments here to the effect you wanted to know how this film was received in 1965. Here is the lowdown.

It was skewered by the few uptight critics who got it, and passed off as sheer nonsense by the ones who didn't. It had a big, big promotional sendoff on television and in the newspapers, featuring its over-the-top ending that is commented on elsewhere in these archives. That, in fact, is the single characteristic placing this film in the history books as one of the first real anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-bourgeois relics of popular culture just at the cusp of an entirely new epoch.

I am still dumbfounded that it went generally over the heads of most people in 1965. (Well, at least I am bemused by it.) "Dr. Strangelove" received much the same treatment. It was as if the country was still on overdrive after the assassination of President Kennedy, numb and oblivious as to what was about to happen. Only the very young, influenced as they were by the Beatles and other revolutionary pop music icons, seemed to have a clue. But they were powerless within the political vacuum that led up to the war in Vietnam, and by the time all the turmoil of 1968 came along, this movie had been long forgotten.

This is one fan, however, who still regards this wonderful satire as one of the top ten of the 20th century, right up there with the best of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Saturday Night Live (in its better days, of course).