To Evelyn Waugh's satire on American mores, which linked Hollywood with the funeral business, Tony Richardson adds his own focus on sex-food obsession; but, whereas in Tom Jones he delighted in just how good sex and food taste together, here the combination is the ultimate in bad taste. The Loved One thus became, as it was billed, “The motion picture with something to offend everyone,” including Waugh. But even those critics who were most offended admitted it was a very funny film. Robert Morse plays a young English poet come to Hollywood, where he takes a job at a pet cemetery. He meets and falls in love with a funeral parlor cosmetician, who is torn between him and chief mortician Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger, at his most grotesque) - though, in the end, her first love proves to be the funeral parlor itself. The cast includes Jonathan Winters as Wilbur Glenworthy and his brother Harry; Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton as a couple deep in mourning - for their pet; John Gielgud as a dead film director; and small guest spots by everyone from James Coburn to Liberace.
Pauline Kael relates this story: “Bought for the movies, the novel became a Hollywood legend through the efforts of various writers (including Luis Buñuel and Elaine May) to get an acceptable film script out of material that was considered too naughty and macabre for the screen. But movies (and popular culture in general) have been changing so fast that by the time Tony Richardson was scheduled to direct the production, the novel - then being scripted by Christopher Isherwood - was probably considered too tame and limited. Terry Southern was brought in to juice it up....” (in “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”) (JB)