VIDEO : `TWAIN' A CLASSIC ODE TO A CLASSIC.

Byline: Peter M. Nichols The New York Times

The old man in the white suit puffs on a cigar and considers Satan, a figure blamed by everybody for the sins of everybody else. ``Let's hear his side,'' Mark Twain says. ``Anybody who's charged with being spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of all of it, must have executive ability.''

The year is 1905, and Twain - as depicted by Hal Holbrook in ``Mark Twain Tonight!'' - is 70 and on a bristling good tear about politics, racism, lying, the tendency of the righteous to make a graveyard of the globe in their quest for admission to the kingdom of heaven, and humans' exalted notion of themselves in the ranking of God's creatures. ``Man's idea is that the deity sits up nights admiring him,'' he says.

When it was broadcast by CBS on March 6, 1967, the 90-minute show attracted 30 million viewers. Last week it was released for the first time on video by Kultur.

Holbrook, now 74, began what has become 45 years of Twain performances with a monologue at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania in 1954. He currently performs the show 20 to 25 times a year, and the idea remains the same: an evolving accumulation of observations drawn from Twain's writings and put together with considerable dramatic license by Holbrook.

``Twain never wrote the show, but everything in it he wrote,'' he said last week. With someone as prolific as Twain, material is still plentiful. ``Any one selection of five or 10 minutes could come from 15 different sources,'' he said.

At Lock Haven State, the audience began to laugh.

``I realized you could go out on stage and get away with this,'' Holbrook said.

Years earlier, he and his first wife, Ruby Holbrook, both freshly graduated from Denison University, toured rural Texas performing excerpts from Shakespeare and, ``if you can believe this,'' Holbrook said, ``Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.''

Audiences, he added, were accustomed to Roy Rogers. ``Our get-away-with-your-life number was Mark Twain,'' he said. In New York, he expanded the Twain part of the routine and performed it at the Purple Onion Club and later off Broadway at the 41st Street Theater. Ed Sullivan came with some fight-crowd friends, liked what he saw and bought six minutes for his own show.

In 1966, ``Mark Twain Tonight!'' played on Broadway and won a Tony. In the first section of the CBS production, Twain salutes the first pioneer to arrive on any scene (whiskey), chides the National Asylum for the Helpless (Congress) and male 20-somethings (``young men studying for the gallows''), and suggests that the cow-catcher on a slow-moving, much-delayed train he'd been riding be moved from the front to the back to prevent the cows from getting on board.

The second section includes a passage from ``Huckleberry Finn.'' Jim, the runaway slave, is determined to find freedom and work hard so he can buy his wife. Then they'll both work hard so they can buy their children.

Later Twain positions most of mankind somewhere between the angels and the French. ``It's a shame the Noah party didn't miss the boat,'' he says.

The tape is $24.95. Information: [phone].

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Photo

Photo: ``Mark Twain Tonight!'' with Hal Holbrook, first televised in 1967, now is available on video.