Movie review: “The Loved One” (1965)

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TCM featured “The Loved One” recently. The novel (by Evelyn Waugh) was strange enough, but the movie is stranger still. It was billed as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone.” Listen to this cast list: Milton Berle, Rod Steiger, Robert Morse, John Gielgud, Jonathan Winters, Liberace, Robert Morley, Tab Hunter.

 

 

Summary: an innocent young English poet-wannabe (Morse) comes to America in the 1960s to visit (and sponge upon) his successful uncle (the fey John Gielgud), who’s working in the movie industry. Uncle is fired from his studio and commits suicide. Nephew has nothing to fall back upon, and goes into the pet-cemetery business. His girlfriend (Anjanette Comer), who happens to be an embalmer at a high-class cemetery –

 

 

Well, you should really see the movie. It’s too funny and odd and outrageous.

 

 

Waugh’s novel is bitter enough, but the movie is far darker. It’s a bitter movie about the movie industry and the artificiality of Hollywood. Americans are shown to be shallow and stupid, but the British colony in Hollywood (led by the insufferably stuffy Robert Morley, an actor who plays “prime ministers and butlers”) is portrayed just as badly.

 

 

And the moral is: human beings are a bad lot. Bring on the replacements.

 

 

(Postscript: I couldn’t help counting up the name of gay actors in the cast: Gielgud, Liberace, Tab Hunter, Roddy MacDowell. It was a pleasure seeing them all together here. I hope they all got together after filming, and had a drink and a good laugh.)

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For Groundhog Day: Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog,” performed by college students

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What to give you for Groundhog Day?  I wanted very much to share a clip of Rudy Vallee and Robert Morse singing the “Groundhog Song” from the movie version of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” but all I could find on YouTube were audio recordings of Rudy and Robert, and tons of really awful college / neighborhood productions of the same. 

 

 

So nerts to that.

 

 

Then, by chance, up floated another idea.

 

 

I met Richard Eberhart at a poetry reading in the 1980s, and shook his hand, and told him how much I loved this poem, and he smiled and thanked me. 

 

 

I still love it. 

 

 

Below is a link to a video of a group of (I assume) college kids, somewhere, reading the poem (badly) and acting it out and generally murdering it.  Imagine!  The best poem ever written about a dead groundhog!

 

 

I like to think that Eberhart (who died in 2005) would have enjoyed it.

 

 

Happy Groundhog Day.

 

 

(Postscript: if you want to read the poem as it was actually written, try this link.)

 

 

 

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