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,...