(1955/Warner Bros.) VHS
Rave Reviews
“RATED: BOMB! A camp classic … a ludicrous vehicle for Liberace.”
—Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide
“Given sufficient intoxication, you could find this movie amusing.”
—Saturday Review
“Insipidly sentimental, hopelessly hokey, stiflingly hothouse-flowery. … But, oh, how [Liberace] does twinkle!”
—Michael Sauter, The Worst Movies of All Time
Plot, What Plot? Half a century later, Hollywood still hasn’t learned one of the biggest lessons taught by Liberace’s film debut in the infamous fiasco Sincerely Yours: The moviegoing public, as a general rule, is not willing to pay the price of a ticket to see someone on the big screen that they’re used to seeing at home for free.
The other big lesson this film did manage to teach was that Liberace was no actor, and every frame of this film provided further argument for his never starring onscreen again. Despite his enormous success as a TV entertainer, as a movie star Liberace was a total washout. Bouncing merrily at his piano keyboard (often moving like there must be an earthquake going on), smiling broadly with his piano-keyboard-like pearly whites, or, toward the end of the film, clumsily tap-dancing (!), Liberace screams campy, fey appeal. But to old ladies of the naïve 1950s, he was an icon and “dream lover” to whose blatant “flamboyance” they were laughably oblivious. Warner Bros. naturally assumed his TV appeal would transfer well to motion pictures, and he was signed to a two-picture contract. The fact that the second film never got made and that—other than a gut-bustingly funny musical cameo in 1965’s When the Boys Meet the Girls—Liberace never appeared in movies again should give you some idea of how well Sincerely Yours went over.
Poor choices and even poorer execution plagued this project from its beginnings. Firstly, it was based on a rickety old stage play entitled The Man Who Played God, which had previously been filmed in 1932, with the similarly prissy George Arliss in the title role. The story of a famed concert pianist who goes deaf, it was thought to be the perfect vehicle to launch Liberace’s movie career. To adapt and update the material, Warners selected Irving Wallace—later a highly successful novelist, but then just another struggling hack screenwriter. To direct it, they picked Gordon Douglas, fresh off the 180-degrees-different Them! (and later the director of Call Me Bwana and Jerry Lewis’s Way… Way Out).
The basic material has Liberace being pursued by his female assistant Joanne Dru while also “romancing” future Oscar winner Dorothy Malone. The fact that in real life Liberace would have been likelier to go after costar William Demarest than either of these two dames seems lost on the filmmakers. With a glint in his eye, a quart of brilliantine in his hair, and his fingers flying across the keyboard like wildly mating rabbits, Liberace spends almost half the film playing piano in his inimitable style. This element, though undeniably silly, is at least watchable. But when he stands up from this piano stool, the real problems begin … because without the Steinway to hide behind, Liberace is a cipher as a screen persona. Flat line readings, odd vocal inflections, and silent-movie-style “eye acting” are only a few of his problems. The funniest sequence in the film—the one where he realizes he’s going deaf during a concert performance—finds our star making facial expressions more appropriate to locating the source of a flatulent outburst than to experiencing the loss of his hearing.
Given the overall hokiness of the script, we assume he’ll have to face one of those only-in-the-movies “risky operations” where he’ll either get his hearing back or be left deaf for life. Of course, he does. And while ruminating on his choice, he learns to lip-read, using binoculars and spying on strangers in Central Park. Bored, he decides to “play God” by giving some of his “subjects” what he thinks they need most. Eventually his lip-reading skills tell him something he’d rather not know about Malone. Naturally, the film has a happy ending, with an extensive concert at Carnegie Hall by Ol’ Sequin Toes himself.
In today’s more gay-assimilated society, it’s almost impossible to believe that Liberace’s personal preferences could ever have been so ludicrously overlooked. But the fact that they once were did at least create Sincerely Yours, a classic “romantic triangle” in which at least one of the sides was decidedly not straight.
Dippy Dialogue
Howard (Alex Nicol), referring to Liberace’s character: “He respects the classics, but from a sitting position, not from his knees!”
Fun Footnote
For the Ultimate Liberace Musical Experience, check TV listings for When the Boys Meet the Girls and catch him performing the pricelessly suggestive song “Arruba Liberace!”