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	Mark Twain Tonight [VHS] Hal Holbrook Kultur Video, 1999 average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Fabulous!

Mark Twain travelled to Australia in 1895. A journalist reported "He is in no sense a disappointment as a humorist. He starts his audience laughing in the very first sentence he utters, and for two hours keeps them in a continual roar".

This video performance by Hal Holbrook captures what I imagine my fellow Sydney residents would have experienced 114 years ago. It is a delight to watch, not only for a glimpse into the past, but also to hear this timeless storyteller relate a philosophy completely relevant to our early 21st Century.


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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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.


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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