(Editor’s note: originally published in The Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 27, 1940)
Red Skelton’ Trial Film May Make Money for Hís Studio
By Paul Harrison
NEA Service Staff
HOLLYWOOD – the busiest strip of film in the whole film capital is a Metro screen test of Comedian Red Skelton. It won him a job weeks ago and he has already finished his role as a fellow aviator with Bob Taylor in “Flight Command“. But that initial test keeps reeling along.
Executive invite friends to see it. Other studios borrow it for laughs. M-G-M is considering issuing it as a short. The tall young redhead was allowed to do anything he chose, so he put on a one-man vaudeville program highlighted by satirical impressions of various movie heroes dying.
Watching the well-timed pantomime and neckfalls, I felt pretty sure Red Skelton must have had some training in burlesque. And so he had, but he got it in lots of other places too — in every form of show business, actually except grand opera and carnivals.