Although Richardson desecrates Waugh's work, the funhouse approach isn't as much of a violation as Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's recent adaptation of Vile Bodies was. Anarchy is generally the target of Waugh's satire rather than its goal, but messing The Loved One up is perhaps just what the book needs, seeing as Waugh runs off course and bores us with his cranky travel skimmings. In any event, because of the split between text and performance, a movie that one rejects for almost every conceivable reason can still be roughly entertaining.

Rod Steiger, for instance, is able to give Mr. Joyboy more power than this kind of doughy American eunuch ever had onscreen. (He's like a carnivorous Grady Sutton.) Steiger was always the most fearlessly stylized actor of his generation, as anyone who has seen him in Clifford Odets's The Big Knife knows, and he's the one performer in The Loved One who stays ahead of the curve no matter how bent. He confects an insane blend of prissy blandness and queeny bizarreness as the Mom-obsessed kitsch craftsman, the embalmer who is all the creepier because, in his antiseptic American way, he remains oblivious to the macabre side of what he does. (Steiger is so blandly creepy he makes the presence of Liberace as the casket salesman superfluous.)

Mr. Joyboy invites Aimée over to meet his "Mom," an obese, bed-ridden hag who moans in ecstasy over food commercials on TV while her aproned son cooks for her and tells Aimée that he plans to buy a big tub to give Mom her sponge baths in. (This outdoes even Philip Wylie's spewings on the subject of the American mother (194-217).) When Steiger's Mr. Joyboy shows Aimée his bedroom he says with breathy maidenliness, "I wanted you to see it—I don't know why," and effectively sends up the curdled euphemistic propriety that has been the bane of American popular culture since forever and is the one target Waugh hits dead on with his book (and gives it its title).

The movie's best sequence, however — involving Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton as a wealthy couple whose beloved pooch Arthur has died — is an invention. When Dennis arrives to collect the corpse and arrange for its disposal, Mr. Kenton is in the midst of managing his wife's hysterical accusations that he killed Arthur by not loving him enough. (He refused therapy.) It's a nightmare situation, as if Mr. Kenton (rather than Berle) has been miscast as a supporting player in his wife's histrionics and yet he can't refuse to play his part. He tries to reason with her, her voice ripe and yodelly with grief, but whenever he turns to Dennis, Berle's show-biz vet's weariness shows right through and he's instantly nothing but business.