The rest of the movie is considerably less precious. It comes within sight of a rousing thematic variety show, like The Big Broadcast of 1938 with a raft of comedy stars and specialists (including Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, Martha Raye, Lynne Overman, Ben Blue, as well as the incongruous musical guest Kirsten Flagstad), but Richardson and Southern aren't qualified for such proceedings. Instead they turn The Loved One into mere perversity, somehow intended as punitive yet seemingly served as both a delicacy and an intoxicant. Perhaps the only way to enjoy it is to accept that saying something offensive is better than saying nothing at all. The Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One might have agreed with that, at any rate.
Works Cited
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Richardson, Tony. The Long-Distance Runner. New York: William Morrow, 1993.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Southern, Terry. The Journal of The Loved One: The Production Log of a Motion Picture. New York: Random House, 1965.
Stannard, Martin. Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
Ward, A.C. Twentieth-Century English Literature: 1901-1960. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. 1932, 1938, 1948, 1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
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-----. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
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-----. The Loved One. 1948. New York: Little, Brown, 1999.
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