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...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.
score 5/10
marcslope 13 March 2012
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2580569/ |
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3-3-2021 00:05:12