Evening star., 1951-10-11
On the Air
hat 8 to 9
Hour. Less
Than Ideal
By jay Cormody

Those titans, Milton Berle and
Frank Sinatra, collided in the up
per air Tuesday night and in the
opinion of one dial-twister it was
pretty much as if two toy balloons
met head-on. :
! History definitely. was not made.
Mister Television." which is
Berle's name for himself. and
Mister Television jr. were armed
to the teeth with guest stars
which turned the whole thing into
a gang fight. This, in way,
was their respective networks
vote of no real confidence in their
lighters but it added to the view
lers' zest for the battle and to the
cost of the programs from the
sponsors standpoint.
It is not an easy job to follow
1.-THE actual exchange of blows in
bouts such as this unless one has
two television sets or a houseboy
named Ming standing at the set
switching channels every second.
1t is not quite the same as if the
Giants were playing at the Polo
Grounds and the Yankees in their
stadium. but something like it
There was Berle in Channel 4
(NBC-WNBW) and Sinatra away
out in Channel 9 (CBS-WTOP-
ITV) and the spectator rushing
from one to the other trampled
poor channels Z and 5 all over the
living room rug. Once. racing like
mad across these, the selector
| stopped on WMAL-TV and
What's On Your Mind" looked
more interesting than both Berle
and Frank.
The Monster Dismayed-The
best one could hope for un-
der the circumstances was to
catch a highlight of each pro-
gram. BY the barest chance this
was made possible by the spacing
Iof a couple of sketches which
seemed typical Of the two per-
formers.
The Berle one was a burlesque
of Hamlet" which in its more
than 800 years is the worst thing
that ever happened to the great
est play ever written. Berle, of
course. is bound to have heard of
Hamlet" AS entertainments
most notorious connoisseur of
iother mems work, it was inevitable
that he would get around to
Shakespeare's.
There have been countless clever
burlesques of Hamlet" This was
not one of them. 1t was not writ
ten as crudely as it sounded with
Berries inevitable ad Ibis. or as it
looked with his mixed wrestling
bouts with the girl playing
IOphelia. but it was pretty bad.
The comedy highlight of this
caricature of Hamlet" was one
not written into the script, and
almost surely not anticipated by
the star or the director of the
sketch. This was Boris Karloff' S
embarrassment to find himself do
ing such outrageous things to a
classic in the role of King Clau-
dius. Karloff, an intellectual who
has made happy life of playing
monsters, gave a wondrous i'm
preston here of a man who was
sure; he had gone too far. III
There was no Queen Gertrude
character in the skit, but Ber1e as
Hamlet was not going to be a
Prince without mother merely
because of this oversight On the
part of his writer's.
He implied a mother at least by
addressing several remarks to the
audience where his own mother
was sitting.
There is an old saying In the
theater that Hamlet needs no de-
fense" against those who bur-
lesque it. This may be no longer
true.
Sinatra in Slapstick - While
Uncle Milty was bubbling his way
through this, Sinatra over in
Channel 8 was working his way
toward quite a different imitation
of his betters.
1t was not quite clear to one who
had fingered too long with Berle
what Sinatra's Skit was about. but
the imitation was not to be missed.
His man was Chaplin in the role,
apparently. of Monsieur Verdoux.
At any rate, there he was in