Based on a very funny novel by Evelyn Waugh, updated by Terry Southern, with a first-rate cast, and directed by the diabolically innovative Tony Richardson, it ought to be a hilarious send up of Hollywood and its Death Industry, but it doesn't quite gel.

I'd have to guess why. When it first appeared the information was novel. The funeral park "Whispering Glades" (read "Forest Lawn") may have been news to the uninitiated in the 1950s and early 1960s but is by now notorious for its vulgarity.

Then too the humor is mostly low in key, the kind that reads better on the page than it looks on the screen. Some of Waugh's lines have stuck with me for forty years. "Resurrection NOW!" A woman's eyes that have "the rich hint of lunacy." An embalmed body that is "shrimp pink, incorruptible." "They told me, Francis Hinsley./ They told me you were hung./ With red protruding eyeballs/ and black protruding tongue." A general says: "I don't trust those Washington egghead civilians. Too many pinko PREverts." Even Terry Southern's tweaking doesn't help much because he outdid himself a year later with "Doctor Strangelove."

Another problem is that the script may be too literate for many viewers, especially today. Anjanette Comer, as "Amy Thanatogenis" (get that?), shows Robert Morse around the grounds of the vast, parklike cemetery. "These are the Falls of Xanadu," she explains, where the bodies of sailors, fishermen, yachtsmen, and admirals are buried underwater. "The falls of Xanadu," remarks Morse. "Odd that Coleridge didn't mention them in the poem." Replies Comer: "What poem? All the features here were created by the Blessed Reverend."

Not that it isn't funny -- because it is. Morse and the Puritanical Comer become engaged by kissing through a hole in a monument with a plaque quoting some lines from one of Robert Burns most sentimental and touching pieces. "Do you know how the poem ends?", he asks her, before quoting them.

"John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And mony a cantie day, John, We've had wi' ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, And hand in hand we'll go, And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo."

"Why must you be so coarse?" she asks in irritation. ("Sleep thegither" has bothered her.)

I'm just not certain a young contemporary audience is going to get much of this. Maybe I'm wrong. But things -- American values and such -- have changed so dramatically that events have rendered this comic story almost opaque, by turns too obvious and too arcane.

At time, in an occasional attempt to transcend reality in the interests of laughs, the films turns absurd. Boy, does Rod Steiger do an outstanding job as Horace Joyboy, the semi-gay chief embalmer of Whispering Glades, fawning in front of his obese and bed-ridden mother who turns on the TV only to watch the commercials. A monumental presence. And Steiger describes this dream he has of buying lobsters for his mother by the dozen, "the way other people buy eggs." He boils the lobsters in his dream and sets the platter before his Mom, but the lobsters are alive again. No matter. She tears into them anyway. But then the dream becomes twisted because the lobsters turn on her and attack her with their claws, eating away at her, until she's gone. Steiger -- her slave, sitting in the kitchen in his dainty apron -- seems sad and puzzled by the nightmare. I don't see an audience of young people screaming with laughter at a scene like this.

This film was made in the early 60s, a transition period between the clichéd 1950s and the explosively destructive late 1960s. It is like a balloon blown up to the point at which it is ready to pop, but not having popped, remains a recognizable blown-up balloon.