Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

thrall7 I had heard about "The Loved One" while I was in high school but never got a chance to see it during the limited run it had in my area of NYS. Years went by and I kept seeing it pop up on favorite "cult film" lists. Finally, about two years ago I finally got a chance to watch it and loved it. I'm amazed at how irreverent, cynical, and, yes, offensive it is - and just how funny it is, too. The ads for it noted that there was something to offend everyone. After finally seeing it I can definitely agree with the ad campaign. The cast is excellent. Robert Morse's transition from "wide-eyed innocent" to one of the most cynical and opportunistic characters is terrific. I was always a huge Jonathan Winters fan, and always felt that his acting was underrated. (Check him out in "The Twilight Zone" episode about a famous pool player.) The entire British ex-pat group is wonderful. Rod Stieger's turn is phenomenal, particularly when you stop to think that he appeared in "The Pawnbroker" within months of this film. Talk about two widely different roles. Finally, Annjanette Comer's change through the film is great. (By the way, look up the meaning of her character's name sometime. It's a very subtle play on the entire theme of the movie.) This film's greatest problem was that it was released at the wrong time in history. It definitely paved the way for a number of dark, very off-beat comedies that followed, like "Brewster McCloud." I can honestly say that all of those "cult film" lists that had "The Loved One" included were on the mark. You should see this long-overlooked film.

beatcamel I really wanted to like this film. The creative team behind it is astonishing and its cast is remarkable.However the film is obviously written by two people who know how to write novels, not films.The story just meanders and wanders and rambles and it takes quite some time to figure out exactly what is going on and what action we're supposed to be following.It's worth watching as a cultural snapshot, it's got that zany 60s laugh- in type humor happening in spades (the scene with the girls in the coffins comes to mind) but as a film itself it is a mess.

dougdoepke From the moment Morse's plane touches down in LA, we hear choral strains of America the Beautiful; then, for the next two hours, the movie goes about deconstructing that optimistic note. LA comes in for special ridicule, but so do national institutions. Pentagon brass are bribed into converting Earth's gravitational belt into an orbiting graveyard-- not exactly standard operating procedure.Then there's organized religion's Blessed Reverend who shifts entrepreneurial gears faster than an Enron CEO, but with much better success. And when worker-bee Aimee's virginal illusions are finally shattered by the randy reverend (Winters), she chooses a beautiful death over an unfiltered life. Now she can join the godlike statuary in the eternal beauty that Whispering Glen peddles. Illusion, the movie appears to say, is what ultimately counts in this land of manufactured dreams.The black humor was considered outrageous at the time, especially the mincing Joyboy and his beached-whale of a mom. In those days, "gay" still meant "joyously spirited" and Liberace's sudden appearance with the girls amounted to a new kind of "coming out". The black humor here follows Dr. Strangelove of the preceding year, but lacks the latter's coherence and wallop. This is a movie of bits and pieces-- oblivious Aimee swinging high above the LA precipice; gross-out Mom inspiring gobs of John Waters movies; gate-keeper Coburn thinking poet equals subversive; the Blessed Reverend toting up profits by getting rid of the "stiffs". There are other moments, often hilarious. Nonetheless, the movie doesn't so much culminate as finally peter out. And when the film's final words advise Morse "to go left", we may be getting more than a compass bearing.As another reviewer points out, this is a film ahead of its time. In fact, it may well be a milestone on the way to the general irreverence of the late 60's when no topic was off- limits. 1965 was a transitional period between the convention-bound 50's and the rebellious upsurge still two years away. A more detailed history would, I think, include The Loved One as a key step in the iconoclasm to come. Though much of the initial punch has been lost, the film still has its moments. Besides, I often get a whiff of the Blessed Reverend whenever I hear the dulcet tones of aggressive sanctimony, which these days is all too often.

carvalheiro "The loved one" (1965) directed by Tony Richardson from Free Cinema as current of the British Cinema at the time was not very well received, because of the strangest subject and sordid welfare in it. Under such a comic and quite enough cosmic slapstick, like an anticipation of the more than probable twisted XXI Century in an almost fascist diversion of its religiosity, by such a character as a declared candidate to be like a mouse in experiment for steam cells, in a spirit of continued human split. The disjointed look of this young traveler - who chooses Los Angeles on the place of Calcutta - saw the crossed gigantic net of motorways, watched by him from the window of the TWA plane, just before landing and being submitted as passenger to such an unrealistic control on the airport by old questions and an open book not well actualized of expulsions by bad character. Suited by another encounter with his uncle on a cafeteria of a studio in Hollywood and by a reception in a club, where on the wall the official portrait of Johnson is quickly substituted by another of the Queen Elisabeth II, that stays leaned in a nonconformist touch of displaced meaning of less subtlety. But it conveys for anybody that the purpose had some effects of visual art as its private scandal and joke with the commerce of mortuary's mortgage. For instance when we saw the visit at Xanadu Park near Los Angeles, where the allegedly young poet declares loving his Emily, the woman who works for the private enterprise where it was buried his eccentric uncle after he was found hanged, as the character of a painter performed by John Gielgud. His direct heir is his nephew that finally is not well served by the circumstances, when taking acquaintance with the girl from the business of the deaths in America, as joke to the dreaming way to the sky adventure also. After a while he is employee in a dog cemetery nearby the Los Angeles airport, it seems by the narrative of that eccentric story adapted to the level of life in an open society of magnificence and privileged of the Earth. The rocket that is prepared to go straight ahead to the stratosphere with the dog's remains, after the scene of the couple's crisis inside a beautiful house with futuristic architecture, it is a case of ridiculousness of such kind of desires from a well furnished family but without children, living in abundance and happiness just before the dog pass away. The British humor from the director is of course just before the Vietnam war beginning in the same year and there is too here and there on the story some moments where the viewer can see for instance officers experimenting a coffin, even sleeping a while inside one as if it was a boom of generosity of the time for professionalism. In itself the movie is interesting in some gimmicks as the scene of the suspended house over the mountain with the girl and the boy in unstable equilibrium, at the time of the first journey of The Beatles in America and because of that it is a tread of time. Why not understanding all kind of frivolities here with a human sense even though the dubious taste is of course a legacy from the novel of Evelyn Waugh ?