O Semeador de Felicidade

The music alone is worth the price of admission in this somewhat corny film, but with Liberace in the romantic lead who in their right mind would have expected anything more. The plot: famous pop/concert pianist, at the peak of his career, suffers a sudden loss of hearing threatening his career and his personal life. The personal life is portrayed in the lovely form of a doting and smitten fan played by Dorothy Malone who captures the heart of our leading man, all this transpiring under the watchful eyes of the musician's administrative assistant/girl Friday, played by Joanne Dru, who has been reluctant to tell him of her hidden love for him. While Liberace is no Barrymore, his performance is a credible one. He is complemented by a fine supporting cast, including trouper William Demerast as his manager, Lurene Tuttle as a sad mother of a snooty daughter, and Richard Eyer as a crippled boy longing to join the other kids on the football field. The latter two flesh out a subplot wherein the star learns to cope with new challenges in his own life by helping others to deal with problems in theirs. Once you get over the fact that Ms. Malone and Ms. Dru would be quite unlikely to give Liberace the amorous attentions in real life that they afford him in the movie, the film is actually quite entertaining. If you enjoy Liberace's musical style, this movie is worth watching--and listening to--for that reason alone. Watch it with an open mind and I am sure you will be entertained by this movie.

Surprisingly enjoyable to watch given the average rating. Good engaging story. Honestly I'm surprised the movie was such a bomb commercially and critically when it was released, and my guess is that Liberace simply did not display the expected characteristics of a typical leading man of the time; and probably it was way over-hyped and failed to live up to expectations. Admittedly his acting was a bit flat.. From the perspective of his life and performance career, I found the movie fascinating and enjoyable and would watch it again.

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.

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.

...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.