The Loved One

The satire in Evelyn Waugh's darkly comic novel -The Loved One was originally double-edged. The book was not only an attack on the Southern California funeral industry but also a lampoon of Hollywood's "British colony," those clannish, cricket-playing English actors of years gone by who bemoaned the ...more

Evelyn Waugh purists may bristle at the liberties taken in translated his macabre and morbidly amusing novel to the screen (sending corpses into space, indeed!), but if The Loved One varies from the novel in both plot and tone, it still shares the same blackly comic view of humanity. While Waugh was subdued and subtle in his depiction of the mortuary industry, director Tony Richardson and writers Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood are much blunter and more obvious; indeed, at times there's ...more