Word: wholely
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Beyond his showman's skills, Milton gets into all the offstage acts too. Though his contract gives him the right to assist in putting the show on, he runs the whole business. He has a master grasp of the TV medium still rare among lesser practitioners who are hamstrung by radio techniques. He calls the show's camera shots, directs the acts, plans the continuity, bosses the booking, writing, lighting and costumes, dictates the musical arrangements (and frequently hands them out to the musicians), approves the scenery (and sometimes helps shift it) and, in rehearsal, often leads...
...Whole Gamut. Always reaching for more laughs, Berle has even tried stooping for them. At Chicago's Palace in 1933, he broke records for five weeks but he outraged the late Chicago Daily News Critic Lloyd Lewis, who found him a "blab-mouthed, satyr-eyed kid" who "toys with physiology, pathology and pruriency, tossing them about with all the freedom of a delinquent boy." On television, acutely conscious of his juvenile following and of the strait-laced National Broadcasting Co., Berle keeps it clean...
Ever looking upward, Milton tried the legitimate stage. In the 1932 Vanities, the Times's Brooks Atkinson calmly noted in Berle "a certain derivative exuberance." In 1934's Saluta, Atkinson found him running "the whole gamut from vulgarity to grossness" with "immense enthusiasm and no discrimination at all." Since then, Berle's theatrical record consists of two moderate successes (See My Lawyer and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943) and, most recently, an immoderate flop (Spring in Brazil). He has also flopped several times as a producer and backer. As a producer, he did so much tampering with...
...story turns on an ambassador's diary, which is stolen from a Paris embassy and concealed aboard the Paris-Trieste-Zagreb express. As the train rushes on through the night, the plot drags tediously from one compartment to another, deliberately involving a whole gallery of British tintypes, a sprinkling of Frenchmen and a lone American G.I. In the resultant overcrowding, both action and suspense are very nearly suffocated. Following in a long line of brilliant British thrillers-on-wheels (e.g., Night Train, The Lady Vanishes), Sleeping Car rides at the end of a slow freight...
...green or brilliant crimson" and his lowbred way of breezily combing his long tresses during a dinner given in his honor. At one such function he was asked which of two countrywomen of his was the more beautiful, the Duchess of Sutherland or Mrs. Caroline Norton, and put the whole Eastern seaboard into deep freeze by replying airily: "Well, I don't know. Mrs. Norton is perhaps the more beautiful, but the Duchess to my mind is the more kissable...