Loved One (DVD)

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The studio dubbed it "The motion picture with something to offend everyone!"

It's hard to say why some films succeed and others don't. There was no reason on earth why MGM's 1965 release "The Loved One" shouldn't have been a smash hit instead of leaving critics divided and a good many viewers indifferent.

The movie was a dark satire following on the heels of Stanley Kubrick's hit "Dr. Strangelove" of the year before. Terry Southern ("Dr. Strangelove," "Easy Rider," "Candy," "The Magic Christian") and Christopher Isherwood ("Berlin Stories"/"Cabaret") wrote the screenplay from a best-selling novel by Evelyn Waugh ("Brideshead Revisited"). Tony Richardson ("A Taste of Honey," "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"), having just won an Oscar for "Tom Jones" in 1963, directed. Noted British composer John Addison ("Tom Jones," "Torn Curtain," "Sleuth," "The Seven Per Cent Solution") penned and conducted the music. And the cast followed the pattern set by "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," loaded to the gills with top-name entertainers in major and minor roles: Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters (in dual roles), Anjanette Comer, Dana Andrews, Milton Berle, James Coburn, John Gielgud, Tab Hunter, Margaret Leighton, Liberace, Roddy McDowall, Robert Morley, Barbara Nichols, Lionel Stander, Rod Steiger, and Paul Williams, among others.

Yet critics could be brutal. Stanley Kaufman wrote that the film was "a spineless farrago of collegiate gags." The "New Yorker" said it was "a sinking ship that makes it to port because everyone on board is too giddy to panic." And Pauline Kael said reluctantly that "even a chaotic satire like this is cleansing, and it's embarrassing to pan even a bad movie that comes out against God, mother and country." But is it really bad? Certainly not; some critics and audiences found at least parts of it hysterically funny. It's just not another "Strangelove," which is perhaps an unfair comparison in the first place. The problem I've always had with "The Loved One" is that it tries to cover too much ground with too much material that is simply too obvious and too unfunny.

"There's got to be a way to get those stiffs off my property!" --Jonathan Winters

For the most part, "The Loved One" pokes fun at the overcommercialization of the funeral business in America, something novelist Evelyn Waugh found deplorable when he visited the country in the late 1940s. However, the movie takes a while to get there, and once it does it dilutes the funeral satire with send-ups of too many other things as well: the British movie colony in Hollywood at the time; the movie industry itself; snobbishness; athletic clubs; suicide; racism; pet cemeteries; shallow poets; phony gurus; retirement communities; TV commercials; gluttony; motherhood; the military; and authority in general among a host of other things. It's as though the storytellers were never convinced they could keep an audience interested in any one area for a full two hours, so they had to pull in a ton of peripheral subjects to lampoon as well.

The two top-billed stars are Robert Morse, still fresh from "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and Jonathan Winters, still fresh from his comedy albums, stand-up act, and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." But Hollywood never seemed to know what to do with these two brilliantly talented fellows. The actors worked best with broad physical humor, vocal characterizations, and improvisation, and the film does, indeed, have an improvisational feel to it. But the improvisational tone seems more careless than inspired, and both lead actors are still too hemmed in, despite Winters being given multiple roles to perform (as Peter Sellers had done in "Strangelove"). By this I mean that Morse plays a young, naive English poet, Dennis Barlow, just come to America because he won a ticket on an airlines, who seems no more English than I do, his British accent coming and going in the wind; and Winters, as the boring Henry Glenworthy and as his own brother, the lecherous and at least slightly more animated Blessed Reverend Dr. Wilbur Glenworthy, finds almost nothing to sink his teeth into.

Dennis arrives penniless in America and takes up lodging with his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud), who soon hangs himself. Dennis has to make funeral arrangements, and he becomes involved with the two Glenworthys and Whispering Glades cemetery.

The movie's plot is so slender it's like Morse's accent, coming and going at will. Mostly, the film is a series of odd sights, caricatures, and gags, most of them happening for no particular reason, like Dennis falling asleep head first in his potatoes at a posh British luncheon.