Evelyn Waugh's macabre satire on American mores linked Hollywood with the funeral business; Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) added his own sex/food obsession. The Loved One thus became, as it was billed, “The motion picture with something to offend everyone,” including Waugh. Robert Morse plays a young English poet come to Hollywood, where he takes a job at a pet cemetery. He falls in love with a funeral parlor cosmetician, but this coy mistress is torn between him and the head mortician, the grotesque Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger). Now, Mr. Joyboy has a mom, and Mom has a refrigerator, and, well…do you see the cranberry sauce anywhere? Most of the food and some of the characters are dead, and all are being consumed in the capital of that sort of thing, Los Angeles, photographed in stinging black-and-white by Haskell Wexler.