Loved One (DVD)

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The two most noteworthy players in the cast are Liberace, well cast as Mr. Starker, a slick casket salesman; and Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, a prissy head embalmer who loves his work perhaps too much and lives with his obscenely obese mother. Mr. Joyboy is surely the most bizarre person in the film and among the most memorable, but Steiger plays him so seriously that instead of the character being as funny as he should be , he seems more creepy and not a little scary.

Satire is not as easy to pull off as the best satirists make it look. The actors and filmmakers must play it straight but not, as in the example of Steiger, so straight that they lose the humor of the situation. Most of "The Loved One" has its heart in the right place but comes off awkward and clumsy, the actors and director not quite knowing how to approach the subject matter.

Then, too, the film gets bogged down in a doomed love affair involving Dennis with a funeral cosmetician named Aimee Thanatogenous (Anjanette Comer), who is in love with death. Plus, there are peripheral characters who have no more than a brief scene each, like James Coburn as an immigration officer; Milton Berle as a man whose wife's dog has just died; Roddy McDowall as the head of movie studio; Dana Andrews as an army general; Robert Morley as a snobby British movie actor; Paul Williams as a precocious teen rocket scientist (Williams in his first film role was about twenty-five at the time); and Tab Hunter as a cemetery tour guide.

I must say, though, that for all its bland bad taste, irreverence, and naughtiness, the thing I liked best about the picture was...the picture. That is, I loved the work of cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who was also one of the film's producers). There are some wonderful shots of the statuary in Whispering Glades practically coming to life as the camera circles slowly around them. Then there's a scene where Rod Steiger is putting various faces on the corpse of John Gielgud that is priceless. And it's hard to forget the image of Mr. Joyboy's gluttonous mother lying at the foot of an overturned refrigerator, covered in food and avariciously clinging to a roasted turkey. So, for me, "The Loved One" is a small series of lasting visual memories rather than any fond recollections of its wayward humor.

Video:
Warner Bros. obtained a good print of this MGM film, one largely unblemished, and they transferred the picture to disc at a ratio closely approximating its original 1.85:1 theatrical dimensions. However, the image quality is still not as good as it might have been forty years ago. The black-and-white contrasts are sometimes quite vivid and other times a bit soft and faded. The object delineations can vary from sharp and clean to somewhat fuzzy. And film grain can be almost totally absent from some scenes and readily apparent in others. You get a little something to delight and offend everyone here, too, just as in the movie.

Audio:
Even odder than the picture quality is the sound quality, rendered via Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural reproduction. In its favor, it is very quiet, with no background noise to interfere with our listening. But it is limited in frequency and dynamic range, and, worse, the actors' voices seem to have been recorded separately from the action and in a completely different acoustic environment. On the accompanying featurette Robert Morse admits that his voice was entirely looped. I can't help thinking the studio did this for all, or most, of the actors as well.

Extras:
Among the few extras on the disc, the new, fifteen-minute featurette "Trying to Offend Everyone" is of most importance. Haskell Wexler, whom I've mentioned was one of the film's two producers and its cinematographer, plus three of the film's stars--Robert Morse, Anjanette Comer, and Paul Williams--and assorted others reflect on the production's significance. In addition, there is a widescreen theatrical trailer; thirty-one scene selections (but no chapter insert); English as the only spoken language; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Parting Shots:
Today, "The Loved One" has attained a kind of cult status, its admirers flocking to its defense. I have no doubt it was controversial, innovative, even groundbreaking in its time, and as a historical piece of filmmaking, it surely has a place. Moreover, it contains any number of memorable bits and pieces. But the diverse parts never coalesce into an effective whole, and as satire and black comedy the film continues to leave me as unmoved today as it did when I first saw it over four decades ago.

"Resurrection now!" --Jonathan Winters