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As a musician I'm nearly always disappointed by films which intend to show musical performances (one exception is the 1947 film CARNEGIE HALL, which is otherwise a poor film). Though I'm certainly not a Liberace fan, I was pleasantly surprised by not just the plentiful musical sequences but that they generally played full excerpts without unusual cuts. Even when there are cuts (as in, obviously, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1), the excerpts begin and end at totally appropriate moments. I gather that Liberace or his brother George (credited as a music director) had something to do with this.

Liberace can't really act (his face rarely shows any kind of emotion), but at least the film is not boring. It's fascinating to watch the color - you almost need sunglasses for those 1950s styles.

Poor Liberace. Imagine being that talented and that flamboyant at a time when being gay was illegal as well as classified as a mental illness. Liberace fought allegations of homosexuality until his death from pneumonia caused by AIDS in 1987. In 1955, however, he was at the top of his game, arguably the most popular pianist who ever lived. This film offers plenty of insight into his talent and appeal, especially to older women, who saw in him the kind and attentive lover they longed for, made even more sympathetic by the fact that his character copes with losing his hearing by improving the lives of others. The film includes 31 piano pieces-everything from Chopin to "The Beer Barrel Polka," boogie-woogie to "Rhapsody in Blue." It's almost a time capsule, minus the on-stage excesses he ultimately became known (and ridiculed) for. Look for background shots of San Francisco and check out costar Joanne Dru's gorgeous wardrobe. This is the only film in which "Mr. Showmanship" played the lead. At the 1982 Academy Awards ceremony, presenting the award for Best Original Score, Liberace prefaced his performance of selections from each nominee by joking, "I'm very proud of my contribution to motion pictures. I've stopped making them."

Would the radio ads of the day announced: '"LIBERACE: inSINCERELY YOURS" thus starting the thin edge of the wedge about his reputation? I wonder.....This film has a howling reputation in Australia. For some reason it is really well known with the over 45s who still today make jokes about it. There must have been one major TV moment in this Nation's history in about 1967 when the entire population - all ages - must have watched it on the same night . I did, all my school friends did, Granny, Mum and Dad all the Aunties and Uncles and even people from other TV stations did. Because the next week or so they made a big deal about showing 'the original' which is 1931 film THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD with George Arliss and Bette Davis. and if we stayed up late on a Friday night and saw THAT we could compare the two. Somehow SINCERELY YOURS stained the nations psyche...and future film makers...just look at the demented campy musicals Australia has made in the last decade. One friend said once to me: "when I saw the apartment with those big rooms and that patio with the view, I thought this is what life was going to be like when we grew up." And it is true! we all did! It screened about the same time THE JERRY LEWIS SHOW made a debut on Oz TV. and of course weren't we all in for a disappointment when we grew up. I think SINCERELY YOURS should be reissued and made into an audience participation film like ROCKY HORROR or MOMMY DEAREST. Lush, camp and ridiculous. Great viewing. Almost all through as good as the fantastic scene in MIDNIGHT LACE when Doris Day goes mad on the stairs. She lets out some sort of wobbly primeval shudder and howl. Incredible! Well all of SINCERELY YOURS is like that except with Liberace leering and tinkling as well, and on a shag carpet, under a chandelier. Wow!

It's hard to believe that I never previously viewed this film since I was raised in Liberace's hometown of West Allis, WI, an abutting suburb of Milwaukee. My sister attended West Milwaukee High School long after Liberace graduated and learned more about him than I will ever know.

The cast is very good and Liberace is a better actor than most pianists', right up there with Hogy Carmichael? ('Best Years of Our Lives' and other films - NOT! Well, let's say Liberace holds his own.

The screenplay is okay but it is certainly inspired by the life of Beethoven, so it wasn't very original.

Liberace may have been under-rated due to his flamboyance and his theme song 'I'll Be Seeing You' (recorded by many artists) was not composed by him. So what! He was an icon who will always be remembered by many, in one way or another.

...You never for a moment forget that he's Liberace, self-invented camp icon, and accepting him in another role becomes impossible. (It's like an old New York magazine word competition, where you were supposed to follow a line of actual dialog with a typical viewer's reaction. A winning entry was, "Hello, I'm Dr. Lowenstein..." "Hello, I'm Barbra Streisand.") That odd-looking face tries to emote and a couple of times nearly succeeds, and he also sings a bit (a song of his own composing, based on Chopin, with a soupy Paul Francis Webster lyric) and tap dances. The mid-'50s melodramatics, as penned by no less than Irving Wallace, are fun, as is the plush production design, and it's one of the whitest movies ever made--what, were there no people of color in San Francisco or New York at the time? The sheer otherness of it by today's standards is arresting. But it's slow and self-congratulatory, and you know where all the plot strings are headed long before they get there. Still, it's worth seeing, if only in a seeing-is-believing way.