By Bill Duelly
The Warner Archive Collection has finally released the
elusive Liberace feature ‘Sincerely Yours’. Originally released to theaters in 1955, this film is a curio of the
times, the studio system and most importantly a snapshot, (in color no less;
more on that later) of the early stages of the musician’s career.
To be fair to the movie, we need to turn our mental
clocks back to the mid- 50s (so lines such as ‘They’ll love him in San
Francisco’ wouldn’t bring immediate chuckles). That upstart- television- had been keeping
audiences away from theaters in droves. Various new processes were employed to give audiences an experience they
couldn’t get at home, such as Cinemascope and 3-D. So what was one of Warner Brother’s great ideas
? To make a movie with the TV’s first
idol, the charming pianist from Wisconsin, Wladziu Valentino Liberace or as he was known professionally, ‘Liberace’. In hindsight, the reasoning was totally
illogical and was one of the main reasons for the film’s demise: Liberace was available to TV audiences every day
for free, so there was no need to go down to the local theater to pay to see
him.
Cynics have long scoffed at the notion of Liberace
being presented as a “Ladies Manâ€. Yet , he never officially came out of the closet and throughout his
career, he had plenty of women who swooned at his every appearance. They didn’t
seem to care what his sexual preferences were-but Liberace was sensitive to any
suggestion that he might not be a full-blooded heterosexual. He even won a
famous libel suit against a London critic who dared to suggest otherwise.
For Liberace’s screen debut, Warners dusted off a 1932 property,
“The Man Who Played God’, the story of a concert pianist who goes deaf, learns
to lip read and then intervenes in the lives of others. The pianist also finds out that the girl he
was falling for was herself falling for someone else. Yet all along it was his long suffering
secretary who was his real love. Liberace does not set the screen afire as a lead dramatic actor,
although the director Gordon Douglas, who seemed to work with everyone in
Hollywood, from Laurel & Hardy to Sinatra and Elvis, does a good job in
eliciting a fair performance from Lee (as he liked to be called).
One of the popular aspects of Liberace’s TV show was
his ability to play to the camera and invite the audience into his world, with his
brother George and his mom. Playing the
role of a ‘fictional’ performer denied him this resource that worked so well on
the small screen. His public appearances,
not only relied on his mastery of the keyboard but his charm with the older
ladies and frequent interactions with the audience members. And
this is where Sincerely Yours really shines, and makes the disc worth every
penny. We are treated to numerous
concert, dance and nightclub performances, with Liberace charming the audience. The performances are allowed to be worked
through and are not rushed or hurried along, so we get to relax and enjoy the
music and see the true entertainer that Liberace was during his formative years
before the explosion of glitz and glammer of his later Vegas style acts.
Liberace is supported by Joanne Dru as his secretary
(unfortunately since finding out she is Peter Marshall’s sister I can’t help
thinking Hollywood Squares when she is on); William Demarest, always a delight,
plays his manager; Dorothy Malone is his
‘love interest’ and the always dependable LureneTuttle plays one of the beneficiaries
of Lee’s goodness.
The DVD release is presented in the correct 16:9 aspect
ratio for this movie however the image is a little soft and grainy. In all likelihood this is due to the fact
that the film was shot in ‘WarnerColor’, which was just another name for the
then new Eastman Color process. The early
Eastman color stock was very unstable and had a huge grain structure to it), so
don’t expect Technicolor! There are no
extras on the disc.
Click here to order from Warner Archive and view a clip