Word: skeltons
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...radio Sherlock Holmes, brash Mr. Skelton has become a national byword because of his beguiling skill at inventing and solving murder mysteries and sundry crimes. Such is his fame that he is kidnapped by a racketeering evangelist (Conrad Veidt) for the express purpose of devising a police-proof way of eliminating a human stumbling block to an inheritance the cultist has his eye on. Put to the test, The Fox-assisted by some expert mugging and a knowledge of radios -not only traps the evangelist but manages to produce considerable hilarity in the process...
Although Whistling is Comic Skelton's first starring performance, it is by no means his best. His masterpiece is on ice at M.G.M. Made a year or so ago as a screen test, it turned out so slaphappily (mainly because of its doughnut-dunking sequence) that down-in-the-mouth producers, directors and such at the studio are forever running it off when they need some laughs...
...laugh was Skelton's first screen test in 1932. Some bemused underling thought he was a romantic lead, gave him a dramatic test. The result was painful for all concerned. Son of an oldtime circus clown, Skelton had spent half his 19 years trying to make people laugh in medicine shows, on Mississippi river boats, in burlesque, vaudeville, the circus, Walkathons. He had already been thwarted in his life's ambition-lion taming-which dissolved one day when he saw Clyde Beatty clawed in the ring. The screen test over, he returned to vaudeville...
...nearby vaudeville house for an act which failed to show up. His routine consisted principally of falling into the orchestra pit and coming up with a bass drum wrapped around his neck. A pretty usherette thought the act was so bad that she complained to the manager. Skelton was fired. Few months later he married the usherette...
Under the competent guidance of Mrs. Edna Skelton the comic began to amount to something. She wrote routines, made him study with a tutor until he got a high-school diploma, worked his salary up to $300 a week. Daughter of an undertaker she had just completed a course in embalming prior to her marriage. Skelton has never forgotten his friends' warnings that if he married her she could easily slit him open while he slept, pump him full of embalming fluid. Says he: "To this day I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat. . . . I have...