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.
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.)
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