Book Review: The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh - Page 9

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

Fleming, John V. The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Guilhamet, Leon. Satire and the Transformation of Genre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

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.

-----. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Michael Davie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

-----. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Donat Gallagher. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

-----. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ed. Mark Amory. New Haven and New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980.

-----. The Loved One. 1948. New York: Little, Brown, 1999.

Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1958.

Wylie, Philip. Generation of Vipers. 20th Ed. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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