To tie in with HBO’s new biopic of Liberace, here is that ivory tickler’s notorious first and last effort at being a big-screen matinee idol. It’s freshly on demand from Warner Archives, and here’s the dish:

In a perfect bit of casting, Liberace plays a popular concert pianist, a showman who gives the people what they want. His efficient bespectacled secretary (Joanne Dru) has silently pined for years but for some reason he doesn’t notice her. He’ll flee from a conversation with her to go chat with his manager (William Demarest) while the latter is taking a bath! And said manager lives with him in the same swanky New York penthouse, as all managers surely do. Hmm.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden combines a strange and powerful ambience with intriguing character development. Being spoiled and willful and stubborn were bad traits for Victorian children, yet that defines her heroes here, and it gives them spine to subvert the world of grown-ups and effect real change (beginning in themselves). The most famous film adaptation is the 1993 version, though I recall a good 1970s BBC serial that aired in the U.S. on Once Upon a Classic. Other outings include a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version and a Broadway musical. Fans of the story, or of classic children’s movies, should seek out this excellent MGM version from 1949 now available on demand from Warner Archive.

Let’s examine the premise for a moment - it is America, 2020. A mere seven years from now. In the interim, crime, poverty, and disenfranchisement have gotten so bad that, when a future election is held, a group known as “The Founder Fathers” (or, perhaps, “The New Founding Fathers”) are put into power and have created something they believe will cure the ills of an ailing nation. In conjunction with specious scientific studies which suggest many social problems have their roots in the horrific realities of everyday living, and that by letting people act out on their aggressions, the country would be a better place, they come up with a concept. If possible, creating an outlet for such “violent tendencies” would lead to a kind of communal rebirth.

How do you see the future? If you were someone living in the salad days of the ‘50s and ‘60s, there were promises of interstellar exploration, flying cars, high tech lifestyles, and meaningful medical breakthroughs. We’d cure all diseases, live like royalty within our own slick scientific reality, and never once worry about modern maladies like hunger, war, or death. This is Utopia, the perfect portrait of a supposed shape of things to come. Yet for every optimist there’s an opposite, a pessimistic perspective that’s part luddite, part ludicrous. It’s not a fear of technology that inspires these people, but where said advances will take us. Eventually, they believe our “U” will turns into a Dystopia, a horrible place where the End Times dictate our destiny.

Alternative title: Mars Needs Japanese Women

POSITIVES:
Gigantic robot armadillo thing from space!.
Gigantic robot armadillo thing from space shoots pulsar destructo-beams!
Twists and turns and double- (and triple-) crosses.
Nifty, “Now what?” ending.