by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our movie last night was
one I’d been curious about for a long time: Sincerely Yours, the truly bizarre 1955 remake of The Man Who
Played God starring Liberace in the
role originally played by George Arliss in a 1922 silent version and then again
in 1932, in a marvelous early talkie in which he and his friend Murray Kinnell
discovered a young actress named Bette Davis who had bombed out after six
months under contract to Universal and signed her to play the female lead. (In
order to get the part she had to agree to sign a seven-year contract with
Warner Bros. if Jack Warner picked up her option after she finished the film;
she ended up staying 18 years, and despite all the arguments she and Warner got
into over her career and her role assignments, in 1974 she was big enough to
say that those had been “the greatest 18 years of my life.”) The Man Who
Played God (the 1932 version) has got
some bad press over the years, mainly from those who (like Davis biographer
Charles Higham) don’t like Arliss’s highly stylized, theatrical acting style,
but I remember it as a great film, with the Arliss and Davis characters’
generational clash communicated effectively by their clashing acting styles —
Arliss’s slow, fruity, self-consciously “theatrical” and British; Davis’s fast,
relatively naturalistic and American.
Unfortunately, that’s not the movie we’re
dealing with now: the basics of the plot remain — a major concert pianist loses
his hearing, learns to lip-read, uses powerful binoculars to eavesdrop on the
conversations of people in the park below his apartment and “plays God” by
using his money to help them when they need it (the original story was written
as a play by Jules Eckert Goodman called The Silent Voice in 1914, with Wade Boteler as the star; Arliss
filmed it twice, in 1922 and 1932; and two years after Liberace’s version there was another take on The Man Who Played God on the Lux Video Theatre TV show with Boris Karloff in the role — and that would certainly be worth seeing!) — but Arliss’s
powerful, if stylized, acting in the lead is replaced by Liberace’s total non-acting. When I first saw Liberace’s first movie, South
Sea Sinner (1950), I noted that its
four principals had a clash of acting styles: MacDonald Carey’s phlegmatic noir (anti-)heroics, Shelley Winters’ sexpot playing (I
wrote, “As the classic whore with a heart of gold, she had no problem with the
whore part but really had to work overtime to show us the heart of gold”),
Frank Lovejoy’s straightforward old-line Hollywood acting and Liberace’s total
non-acting. “The few lines he gets in the film are delivered in a perfectly
flat, even monotone that doesn’t even try to convey emotion,” I wrote, “and it’s odd indeed that someone who
speaks reasonably eloquently in the film about the rise and fall of a piece of
music couldn’t duplicate that effect when he was merely speaking instead of playing.”
In Sincerely Yours the problem is even worse because Liberace is
supposed to be the lead — he got the part in the first place (as the first of
an intended three-film contract with Warners, though Sincerely Yours was such a box-office bomb that the studio paid
Liberace off and didn’t make the other two films) as the result of his
fantastic popularity on TV and in person — and there’s one positive thing that
can be said about Liberace’s work here: for all the bizarre idiocy of his act,
he actually was a quite capable piano player with a surprising command of a
wide variety of musical genres. Some of them work better than others — like the hard-core classical
concerto he’s playing in the opening sequence or his later (supposedly)
impromptu performance of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” in a party scene (unlike
José Iturbi in his attempt at boogie, Liberace
really gets into the spirit of the music and actually seems to be having fun) — and while some of his selections (notably a
Gershwin medley of “Embraceable You,” “Swanee” and “The Man I Love”) don’t
sound any better than one would expect from a better-than-average
cocktail-lounge pianist, others (including a solo version of Vincent Youmans’
“Tea for Two” — hardly in the same league as Art Tatum’s recording, just as
Liberace’s version of “Tiger Rag” on a Soundie hardly matches the Tatum
version, also from Tatum’s first solo session in 1933, but still reasonably
credible as stride-piano jazz) work surprisingly well.
It’s when Liberace speaks that the problems start: he is utterly unable to
inflect his voice in any way whatsoever, and in the big scene towards the end
when he lip-reads a conversation between his fiancée (Dorothy Malone in the
role formerly played by Bette Davis) and her other boyfriend (Alex Nicol) and
realizes she loves the other guy and not him, he sends her away to the other
man with his blessings in a tone of voice that made me think that the next
thing he was going to do was anticipate his characterization in his only other
feature film, The Loved One (1966), and offer to sell them a coffin. The movie keeps tugging at the
heartstrings, not in any way that has any dramatic integrity (as The Man Who
Played God did), but in the most
treacly sentimental ways imaginable, from Liberace paying for an operation that
allows a crippled boy (Richard Eyer) to play football with his classmates again
to him, during one of his periodic remissions into being able to hear again,
appearing at a benefit for something or other and offering to play requests for
$100 each (one of which is a sappy-sweet song Liberace sings — and like Benny
Goodman, whatever talents Liberace had as an instrumentalist did not carry over to his vocal cords — and for which he’s
credited with the music, with Paul Francis Webster writing the lyrics and
probably wishing he were still collaborating with another famous piano player,
Duke Ellington, though imdb.com reveals the melody was actually from a Chopin
nocturne) and finally wearing
a sequined jacket for the first time in the film and giving us a glimpse of —
pardon the expression — the real Liberace.
Sincerely Yours was pretty obviously remodeled by its writer,
Irving Wallace, along the lines of Universal’s sensationally successful Magnificent
Obsession two years earlier — even
though in that movie it was the woman, not the man, who became disabled; and it
was blindness, not deafness (and let’s face it, in a visual medium like motion
pictures regaining one’s sight is a lot easier to dramatize than regaining
one’s hearing!) — down to the final scene in a hospital room in which Liberace
(or “Anthony Warrin,” as the character is called in this film — “shortened from
Warrinofsky,” we’re told to explain the odd spelling) undergoes an operation,
at first can’t hear even though he’s supposed to be recovered, then suddenly
reacts to the sound of a nurse dropping some sort of surgical instrument and
it’s revealed that he can hear, so he can go on to his long-delayed debut at Carnegie Hall and
not only play what Harry and Michael Medved called “the nauseous mix of
classics and kitsch that is, after all, his stock-in-trade” but do a tap-dance
routine. At the sight of that I felt like joking about Fred Astaire appearing there next week and
playing the piano — until I remembered that Astaire was actually a quite
capable piano player (certainly Astaire played the piano a hell of a lot better
than Liberace danced!) — just as, earlier, during the big operation scene I
commented on the similarity to Magnificent Obsession and said, “Gee, my surgeon looks just like Rock
Hudson!” — and Charles fired back, “Yes, and I’m getting a stiffie!”
Certainly
there are a lot of scenes in Sincerely
Yours that, shall we say, hint
at Liberace’s real-life sexual orientation — notably one in which he walks in
on his manager (William Demarest, somehow managing to cling to his dignity
through all this and actually getting a few of the laughs his “comic-relief”
character was there for) naked in the bathtub (or at least as revealingly naked as the Production Code
would allow), as well as the scenes in which he’s supposed to kiss women (not
only Malone but also his long-suffering secretary, played by Joanne Dru, whom
he ends up with at the end) and he looks like he’s about to throw up. By any
normal artistic standards Sincerely Yours is a perfectly awful movie, and yet it was every bit as entertainingly
campy as I’d expected; it’s so wrong-headed it’s absolutely fascinating — the
other actors keep pitching Liberace softballs and he keeps missing them — and
though the idea that it could actually have been made that way in 1955 is
preposterous, I found myself wishing that Warners had cast James Dean in the
lead and billed Liberace as his piano double the way Mario Lanza was billed as
Edmund Purdom’s voice double in The Student Prince two years earlier: Dean could easily have nailed
the character’s angst (and the
genuinely Bisexual Dean wouldn’t have had the visible difficulties romancing
women on screen the Gay Liberace did!) while Liberace’s presence, confined to
the soundtrack and kept off the screen, would actually have been genuinely
entertaining and even moving. I think the late William K. Everson summarized the difference
between The Man Who Played God and Sincerely Yours all too appropriately when he wrote, “In order to play this part, it is
not necessary that one actually know how to play the piano, which Liberace
could and George Arliss couldn’t; it is important that one be able to act, which Arliss could and Liberace couldn’t.”
