Mark Twain Tonight

Mark Twain Tonight
by Paul Bogart

Mark Twain Tonight
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Product details

Actor: Hal Holbrook
Director: Paul Bogart
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 90 minutes
Release Date: 1999-04-27
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Kultur Video
Studio: Kultur Video

VHS Movie Reviews of Mark Twain Tonight

Movie Review: Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain
Summary: 5 Stars

Saw this presentation years ago as a kid and watched it again now and its still great. Our kid enjoys it, too, so, Mark Twain (and Halbrook) hasn't lost his charm.

Movie Review: Mark Twain Tonight.
Summary: 5 Stars

Long before Spalding Gray brought one-man performance monologues into the mainstream, 40-year-old actor Hal Holbrook perfected this wonderful stage persona as an homage to the elderly author of "Huckleberry Finn" and many other treasures of American literature. His resemblance to Twain is uncanny, his diction impeccable, and the commentary--all folksy wisdom and homespun anecdotes about politics and religion, women, aging, cannibals, and more --came from his long-running Broadway show. This program was a landmark in TV history, and minted Holbrook's reputation. Today it is as enlightening and entertaining as ever.

Movie Review: "Pure" Twain !!
Summary: 5 Stars

If you love a good laugh and thought provoking ideas mixed together, then buy this DVD....It is "pure" Twain !! Also, Mr. Holbrook is great as Mark Twain...

Movie Review: Not his best material, but still a great performance...
Summary: 4 Stars

Those of us old enough to have seen Holbrook do his one-man Twain show in the 1960's, and to have owned the original cast recordings "Mark Twain Tonight" and "Encore: More Mark Twain Tonight" know that this 1967 television version featured second-rate material. Yet second-rate Twain is still better than most comic/philosophical writing. (There was also an original cast recording of this show released.) Now there is a CD on Columbia Legacy called "Mark Twain Tonight" which combines some producer's idea of the best of each of the three older records. I would have picked some different bits if I had the task, but overall that is pretty good and well worth the money. Since this DVD is the only thing available showing Holbrook as Twain when Hal was still young, playing Mark at the age of 70, it will have to do. If you are a real Twain fan, or a real fan of one-person stage offerings, this should be in your collection...but get that CD also, before it goes out of print, for some even better material. In the TV show, the one mistake was spending too many of the 90 minutes on the more "serious" side of Twain---the anti-war social criticism aspect of his works. Don't sit down to watch this and expect it to be all laughs, all the time.

Movie Review: Hal Holbrook mesmerizes as Mark Twain
Summary: 5 Stars

Much as Mark Twain had to do in his life, Hal Holbrook mesmerizes audiences with his portrayal of Mark Twain, the first stand-up comic this nation has ever known.

Hal Halbrook has performed his ever changing Mark Twain stage act before he became a household name in the movies. It took a made for TV special about Mark Twain by Hal Holbrook to rekindle this nation's curiosity about him.

A lot of the things Mark Twain commented on then are just as true today. If it weren't for his having to do a stage routine to work off his owed debts, we would never have been introduced to his wit by other than the written word.

Summary of Mark Twain Tonight

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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