The New Pictures

Frisky (Titanus; D.C.A.) proves that the Italian moviemakers are no better at doing sequels than Hollywood. Bread, Love and Dreams was a pleasant little comedy that got its fireworks from the incendiary performance of Gina Lollobrigida as she scattered sex and devastation through the streets of an Abruzzi village, and in the manly breasts of Policeman Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Risso. Frisky assembles all of the old cast and most of the old plot for another run-through. But this time the razor edge of comedy has dulled: Gina's rowdiness is strident, De Sica's amorous posturings predictable, Risso's Li'l Abnerisms boring. Like the picture itself, the earthquake that brings everything to a happy conclusion is anticlimactic.

Sincerely Yours (Warner) introduces Wladziu Valentino Liberace to the moviegoing public in the role of Ludwig van Beethoven. Before the cameras began to turn, however, somebody began to have doubts. Was not Beethoven, after all, a somewhat limited personality? He was not nearly so famous in his time as Liberace is today, and besides he was a careless dresser. Liberace decided to "insist that all the different facets of my personality ... be included in the picture." As a result, the Beethoven story seems to have been combined with the plot of a well-known melodrama, The Man Who Played God. Liberace could now express his musical talents as Beethoven, and satisfy his dramatic instincts in a part played by George Arliss. Even so, there were some "facets" left over. Liberace listed them: "Joy, sorrow, faith, love of family, love of children, and honesty." Obviously, a third theme was necessary; the story of a poor man's Paderewski who is nevertheless "an authentic genius" and gives pleasure to the millions.

Out of this scrabble of stories, Scenarist Irving Wallace has spelled his tale. Pianist Anthony Warrin, "a warm, perceptive and amusing . . . bachelor in his early 305" (Liberace himself, according to his pressagent, is 35), is at the height of his fame. His sequin-trimmed dinner jacket is faithfully buffed and his glass-topped piano Windexed by a pretty young secretary (Joanne Dru). She loves the man, but he would rather tickle the ivories. In San Francisco, though, the pianist has an experience (Dorothy Malone) that lifts his eyes from the scales. He hurries the young lady off to a museum, where he serenades her on Chopin's spinet and Mozart's harpsichord. ("Mozart," he confides, "became a great composer. He was decorated by the Pope.") And then, as he plays Liebestraum ("A dream of love," he sighs in explanation) on Liszt's own instrument, Pianist Warrin proposes. She accepts, but fate comes between them: the pianist begins to go deaf.

The doctors call it otosclerosis, and tell him that the only chance to restore his hearing is a "dangerous" operation called fenestration. Liberace asks for time "to think it over," and while the sound track booms a medley from Beethoven's Fifth

Symphony, he paces about his penthouse with lips clamped in the expression of the well-known bust in the music room; but somehow, with his fluttery dimples and impetuous curls, he looks rather more like a pink plastic dolly with built-in colic.

The secretary does her best to comfort the man. "Beethoven," she reminds him, "wrote some of his best music after his deafness . . . You can compose!" To prove it, she breaks out a smarmy little melody, Sincerely Yours, that Liberace did in fact compose for this picture. The pianist plays it once and then tries to commit suicide. At the last instant, he is saved by another change of character: off with Beethoven, on with Arliss in The Man Who Played God.

Having learned to read lips, the pianist can follow, through his high-powered field glasses, the conversations of people in the park beneath his terrace. As he eavesdrops into other lives, other problems, his own troubles begin to seem less important. And so everything comes to a crashing climax in Carnegie Hall, as thousands roar for the Liberace rendition of Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame, and the successfully fenestrated hero does a buttery little buck and wing off-right, and into the arms of his ever-loving secretary.

In plain words, the butt of 1,208,121 jokes (so estimated by the National Association of Gagwriters last year) is sitting pretty on top of the entertainment world. Liberace long since took TV, the nightclubs and Madison Square Garden into camp, and now Hollywood's scalp is dangling from his bugle-beaded cummerbund. For Sincerely Yours, no matter if it be viewed as a musicomedy or as a straight-out horror picture, is wondrously slick entertainment. It seems certain to make millions for Warner and plenty for Liberace (who will get a cut of the profits), and it should make him one of the most important and most peculiar cinema sensations in history.

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