Word: berte
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...most effective hucksters on eastern TV is a bashful botcher who muffs his lines, meanders off-camera, even mumbles his apologies for intruding on TViewers' time. His name: Harry Piel. Since January, when Harry and Brother Bert made their debut in a series of cartoon commercials plugging Brooklyn's Piel Brothers' beer, they have won such fame that even the most blurb-worn viewers are changing their ways: instead of ducking out when the commercial goes on, Easterners are now turning on their sets to catch the Piel cartoons. Last week, in response to heavy fan mail...
...which the bottle-bald brothers lampoon the standard TV sales talk, e.g., with slogans such as "Throat-wise, it's delicious.'' Plotwise, the fictional Piel boys, whose lines are spoken by radio's Bob (Elliott) and Ray (Goulding), are a study in opposites. Pint-sized Bert is a gabby, obnoxious supersalesman who shouts his commercials, scolds the audience and continually squelches Stringbean Harry. After a few seconds of bumptious Bert, viewers feel so sorry for well-meaning Harry that they listen carefully to every word he has to say. A New Jersey woman even wrote...
...Bert and Harry are the brain children of Young & Rubicam Copywriter Ed Graham Jr., 27, who has written elaborate biographies for each of the brothers, and talks of them as intimately as if they had all attended P.S. 3 in Flatbush together. Graham explains that Blatherskite Bert is patterned after a retired Young & Rubicam account executive, is "a compulsive pain who can't help stepping on people." Hesitant Harry is modeled on Artist Jack Sidebotham, who drew the brothers, but also bears a marked resemblance to Ed Graham. Envious of Piel's success, two other breweries are planning...
...wonder whether this case is another sample of that Indonesian ''patriotism and wisdom of leadership" which Mr. Dulles was loud in praise of at his press conference in Djakarta. A. BERT VAN ASTEN Oak Park...
...Broadway production is enormously the richer for Comic Bert Lahr's brilliant playing of the more confused of the two tramps. He endows the role with a clown's wistful bewilderment, evocative capers and broad but beautifully precise touches of comedy. Far more than Beckett, Lahr suggests all dislocated humanity in one broken-down man. Others in the cast, however competent, seem a little too studied grotesque or Middle European in style. None the less, Godot has its own persistent fascination. For once in a way, at least, in a theater rife with pointless hurry-scurry, they distinctly...