In addition, Richardson shot the film "almost wholly in sequence" to preserve "the improvisational potential of the film in creation" (Journal); Southern was considered an expert in ad hockery on the set. This is how the silent slapstick stars worked with their teams of gag men, but Richardson, with his "distinguished" background directing Shakespeare and John Osborne, doesn't have the craft to select and shape knockabout material. A scene in which a wedding ceremony has to be accelerated so that the chapel can quickly be converted into a funeral parlor is about as snappy as it gets.

Richardson can't think in either Waugh's or Southern's terms, as is shown by the casting: as Dennis, the American Robert Morse, with his boyishly impudent air, isn't brazen enough for Southern or Waugh (and doesn't seem to come "of an earlier civilization with sharper needs" (54)), and as Aimée, the conventionally whiny ingénue Anjanette Comer lacks the skill to make something of that wobbly character, sententious yet diffident, and "doomed to sterility." (Among young actors of that era Terence Stamp and Barbara Harris, for instance, would have been better choices.) And while Richardson later wrote that the all-star supporting cast (apart from Morley) got into the spirit (195; the cast includes John Gielgud, Jonathan Winters in two roles, Rod Steiger, Milton Berle, Margaret Leighton, Roddy McDowall, Dana Andrews, James Coburn, Liberace, Tab Hunter, Lionel Stander, and, in roles cut to "whittle" the movie from five hours down to two, Ruth Gordon and Jayne Mansfield), the actors seem to have been assembled for a variety of reasons having little to do with appropriate comic talent. Anarchy is not that hard to achieve if you don't pay attention to what you're doing. The result inverts Waugh—irreverence is the only thing holding the picture together.

In his Forest Lawn article, Waugh contrasted the cemetery of the future with the right-thinking traditions of the past; Richardson's movie goes futuristic. To clear Whispering Glades of economically unproductive dead bodies and turn it into a retirement home (with the attendant advantage of higher turnover), the Dreamer collaborates with the Air Force to re-"bury" the dead in outer space. Although the movie deals with the empyrean, it deals with it literally. There is no spiritual dimension to the picture at all, and what the satire of the military adds is on a par with Southern's belabored work on Dr. Strangelove (less deft in the execution, however, because there's no comedy specialist of Peter Sellers's caliber at the center).

The movie also contains fleshpottery absent from the book—an orgy with go-go girls in the casket showroom; an Air Force hero's lascivious stripper wife who demands Dennis's services in return for endorsing Whispering Glade's space program; living statuary that gyrates, simulating copulation. The movie is so broad that it readily accommodates the kind of burlesque that functions as satire at the same time that it turns the audience on, without self-awareness and so without irony.