Milton Berle's Buick Hour, Vol. 2

Story

The second volume culled from Milton Berle's 1953-54 TV series offers two hour-long episodes of the Buick Berle Show, each one short on plot and long on variety-show hot-cha-cha. The first episode is very, very loosely arranged around the idea of how the show is put together, with guest stars who appear to have been drawn from an alphabetical phone book listing: dumb-blonde prototype Dagmar, French singer-actress Denise Darcel, and then-young crooner Vic Damone (performing "April in Portugal"). The second episode has Uncle Miltie pursuing opera singer Marguerite Piazza (she sings an aria from Carmen, classing up the show a bit), while receiving tedious advice from actor Paul Douglas. (Sample joke from an art museum sequence: Douglas points out the work of an "old Dutch Master," to which Berle replies, "It looks more like a White Owl to me." Ouch.) Brassy production numbers, live-television glitches, and plugs for Buick abound. Visually, the shows have the likably washed-out look of TV preserved from that era, though the sound quality is definitely uneven. Just like the jokes. --Robert Horton

Cast

Milton Berle
Jackie Cooper
Vic Damone