Mark Twain Tonight [VHS] | Hal Holbrook

Mark Twain Tonight [VHS] | Hal Holbrook | Top marks for Mark Twain Tonight

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	Mark Twain Tonight [VHS] Hal Holbrook Kultur Video, 1999 average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Come meet Mark Twain. OK, true, the humorist has been dead for more years than we care to remember, and not many of us around today were alive to hear what he sounded like. But Hal Holbrook is so spectacular in his one-man performance that you could swear you were listening to Twain himself. The gravelly voice, the lined face, the slow shuffle, and cigar-induced throat clearings seem so natural that you'll have difficulty recognizing Holbrook beneath the white suit, the gray hair, and the handlebar mustache.

Mark Twain Tonight! began as a Broadway show in the 1960s and was filmed as a CBS special in 1967. Yet you'd never know it, because the humor, which is more than a century old, is still laugh-out-loud funny today. Twain--I mean, Holbrook--gives a monologue that is rambling, intelligent, and humorous as he culls together commentary from a variety of Twain sources. From dachshund hounds, politics, and patriotism to cigar smoking, memory loss, and religion, this 90-minute video leaps from subject to subject as we're entertained by material that's as fresh today as it was when it was written in the 1800s. --Jenny Brown

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Brilliant!

Five stars is not enough. Hal does a masterful job and I can watch this over and over.

Top marks for Mark Twain Tonight

The Hal Holbrook presentation of "Mark Twain Tonight" was even better than expected. Mark Twain was controversial in his time, and is even more so now. He didn't pull his punches, and Hal Holbrook was superb in his characterization. Were he still alive today, Mark Twain would be more controversial than Michael Moore due to his delicate yet wicked touch and his intuitive understanding of politics and the nature of the human character.

Mark Twain Tonight DVD

I've been a fan of this show for many, many years and thought it was gone forever; the new DVD lives up to all my expectations

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An absolute delight

Watching Hal Holbrook re-create Mark Twain is a phenominal experience. I had just finished a book covering the last 3 years of Twain's life and was so impressed with the way Mr. Holbrook brought out the real Twain. It was watching a master at work protaying a genius.

You can't go wrong with this DVD

Do you realize Holbrook is still doing this show -- and is now older than the Mark Twain he portrays?

Having said that, this is a very good DVD. I concur with the comments that the material selected for the television presentation isn't the best Holbrook had used (the first phonograph album's material was much better, and the TV show seemed to cover the second album's material), and the second half's (dare I say) self-righteousness is uncomfortable -- one wonders whether Holbrook's (or CBS') opinions on the Vietnam war influenced the choice and delivery of the material. But, as all good literature, it's still though-provoking.

Technically, the DVD reflects CBS' relative inexperience in early color telecasting -- we forget how poor the resolution of color TV in the '60s really was. The same camera angles kept getting repeated over and over; of course, with color TV cameras being as big and heavy as they were then, there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity to do a lot of creative framing. This really is a minor gripe.

Highly recommended!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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