Sincerely Yours (1955)

Sincerely Yours (1955)

Plot Summary

 Tony Warrin (Liberace) has it all: a popular pianist who plays any style, he has money, great clothes, a penthouse overlooking Central Park, a rich blond fiancée, (Dorothy Malone) a loyal brunette secretary secretly in love with him, (Joanne Dru) and a date at Carnegie Hall. On concert night, disease deafens him. While medical science works on a cure, he must find other ventures. He learns lip reading and, using high-powered binoculars, eavesdrops on conversations in the park. When he finds people in need, he plays God, interceding with help. Meanwhile, his fiancée is falling in love with another man, his secretary quits, and his doctors give him new hope. Carnegie Hall and true love may be within reach.

Yes everybody, Liberace made a movie......

Apparently this movie was SOOOO badly received that Warner Brothers cut short the 2 picture deal they had with him. At one point according to TCM host Robert Osborne some theaters had Liberace's name in smaller letters and underneath the title while the other co-stars got top billing. Hell, there's one anecdote floating around that one particular theater completely omitted Liberace's name altogether.

So is it as bad as all that? Not really, I've seen worse hokum in big budget pictures and while Liberace is no actor he has an amiable persona that translate pretty well despite his rather nondescript acting. He does fall down a little bit with some overacting facially like in the scene where he suddenly discovers he's gone deaf.

Thankfully WB saw fit to surround him with some pretty good actors in Joanne Dru as his secretary. I think she looks rather smart and sexy in these glasses don't you?

The love interest is played by Dorothy Malone who gives a good performance despite not having too much to do. The whole deal with her and Liberace falling in love in the span of 26 hours seemed incredibly forced and rushed but they did have a passable chemistry especially in one scene where Liberace is at his old music teacher's place and they meet for the first time with Liberace pretending to be the maestro.

I was particularly impressed and liked the manager character Sam played by veteran actor William DeMarest. He was your typical brassy manager type with the heart of gold. He was the one that kept telling Liberace to stick to his popular piano music rather than the Carnegie Hall type stuff but in the end a compromise was reached at film's end when the healed Liberace plays Carnegie playing classical music AND some pop type stuff. Unfortunately, there's one scene between the two that is easily joke worthy:

The main problem with the movie is that in order to keep Liberace in his element they took up a lot of time with piano numbers done by him. I will admit that Liberace was a pretty damn good pianist but over the course of 2 hrs it gets to be a bit grating. I did like the nightclub scene where he basically goes through a mini history of the boogie woogie. He was really in his element there and it showed. In fact, any scene involving him and the piano was well done and were the strong point of his acting debut but again, there was just an overabundance of it.

The whole "playing God while looking for faith himself" bit is something that was a pretty worn trope even at that point in time but I thought the story involving the young crippled boy and his grandfather was heart touching especially the scene where Liberace is at his lowest and goes to a church. The little boy and his grandfather happened to be there and Liberace overhears the kid praying to get better so that he could play football. This pushes Liberace to fight on and to live as normal a life as possible with lip reading while at the same time doing good for others as he becomes a (not so) mystery benefactor for the kid and pays for an operation to get him walking again.

All in all I can't say this was a BAD movie per se. I feel like it was a bit overlong and the tons of musical interludes interrupt the story quite a bit. I'd say this is a passable flick ** stars.

Oh and yes, Liberace kisses his love interest at least 4 times in this movie. Here's proof!