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Milton Shulman
Milton Shulman (1 September 1913 – 24 May 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic who was based in the United Kingdom from 1943.
Shulman was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a successful shopkeeper. His parents were born in Ukraine and were driven out of the Russian Empire by poverty and anti-Jewish pogroms. Shulman's father was only 26 when he died of the flu epidemic but had already acquired three millinery shops as well as a men's haberdashery.
Shulman was educated at Harbord Collegiate, then spent four years at the University of Toronto. Although he wished to pursue a writing career, he was articled to a law firm, attending lectures at Osgoode Hall Law School for a further three years before being called to the Ontario bar just before World War II broke out in 1939.
After the period called the "phoney war", Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned to the secret operational intelligence unit MI 14b, dealing with the order of battle of the Wehrmacht's formations.
He joined Canadian Army HQ three months before D-Day as a major and by the war's end he was an intelligence officer with the First Canadian Army. While still in uniform, he interviewed many of the captured German generals in the following months and years including Gerd von Rundstedt and Kurt Meyer. As a result of these interviews, he wrote the Second World War military history Defeat in the West, published in London by Secker & Warburg in April 1947, and by Dutton in New York in January 1948. A paperback edition remains in print.
Shulman joined the staff of the London Evening Standard in 1948 and, for over forty years, wrote about theatre, film, television and politics with sharp humour and irreverence. He was theatre critic for the Standard from 1953 until November 1991, and remained a weekly columnist until February 1996. He had initially become the Standard's film critic in 1948 and later became film critic for Vogue. For 18 years he was a regular participant in BBC Radio 4's talk show Stop The Week.
During this time he also wrote two novels, The Victors (Dell 1963) and Kill Three (Collins 1967); the Preep series of children's books; and two serious books on the impact of television, The Ravenous Eye (Cassel 1973) and The Least Worst Television in the World (Barrie and Jenkins 1973), as well as a 90-minute play for BBC 2 also called Kill Three from which the novel was adapted. (The Victors was unique in being a novelization of the Carl Foreman screenplay about American soldiers in WWII, which was itself based upon Alexander Baron's book of short stories about British WWII soldiers, The Human Kind. Baron declined to write the novelization himself, wanting it to have an authentic-sounding American voice and avoid retreading his own work; but nonetheless also wanted to select the novelist and maintain control over the project. As the book's copyright registration, assigned to Baron, particularizes, Baron engaged Shulman to write the novelization as a work for hire.)
Shulman and his fellow critic Herbert Kretzmer co-wrote the story for the film comedy Every Home Should Have One (1970); the screenplay derived from it was written by the film's star, Marty Feldman, along with Barry Took and Denis Norden; after which the material circled back to Shulman and Kretzmer who novelized the script—and as a movie tie-in edition, it was published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton to coincide with the film's release.
Milton Shulman
Milton Shulman (1 September 1913 – 24 May 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic who was based in the United Kingdom from 1943.
Shulman was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of a successful shopkeeper. His parents were born in Ukraine and were driven out of the Russian Empire by poverty and anti-Jewish pogroms. Shulman's father was only 26 when he died of the flu epidemic but had already acquired three millinery shops as well as a men's haberdashery.
Shulman was educated at Harbord Collegiate, then spent four years at the University of Toronto. Although he wished to pursue a writing career, he was articled to a law firm, attending lectures at Osgoode Hall Law School for a further three years before being called to the Ontario bar just before World War II broke out in 1939.
After the period called the "phoney war", Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned to the secret operational intelligence unit MI 14b, dealing with the order of battle of the Wehrmacht's formations.
He joined Canadian Army HQ three months before D-Day as a major and by the war's end he was an intelligence officer with the First Canadian Army. While still in uniform, he interviewed many of the captured German generals in the following months and years including Gerd von Rundstedt and Kurt Meyer. As a result of these interviews, he wrote the Second World War military history Defeat in the West, published in London by Secker & Warburg in April 1947, and by Dutton in New York in January 1948. A paperback edition remains in print.
Shulman joined the staff of the London Evening Standard in 1948 and, for over forty years, wrote about theatre, film, television and politics with sharp humour and irreverence. He was theatre critic for the Standard from 1953 until November 1991, and remained a weekly columnist until February 1996. He had initially become the Standard's film critic in 1948 and later became film critic for Vogue. For 18 years he was a regular participant in BBC Radio 4's talk show Stop The Week.
During this time he also wrote two novels, The Victors (Dell 1963) and Kill Three (Collins 1967); the Preep series of children's books; and two serious books on the impact of television, The Ravenous Eye (Cassel 1973) and The Least Worst Television in the World (Barrie and Jenkins 1973), as well as a 90-minute play for BBC 2 also called Kill Three from which the novel was adapted. (The Victors was unique in being a novelization of the Carl Foreman screenplay about American soldiers in WWII, which was itself based upon Alexander Baron's book of short stories about British WWII soldiers, The Human Kind. Baron declined to write the novelization himself, wanting it to have an authentic-sounding American voice and avoid retreading his own work; but nonetheless also wanted to select the novelist and maintain control over the project. As the book's copyright registration, assigned to Baron, particularizes, Baron engaged Shulman to write the novelization as a work for hire.)
Shulman and his fellow critic Herbert Kretzmer co-wrote the story for the film comedy Every Home Should Have One (1970); the screenplay derived from it was written by the film's star, Marty Feldman, along with Barry Took and Denis Norden; after which the material circled back to Shulman and Kretzmer who novelized the script—and as a movie tie-in edition, it was published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton to coincide with the film's release.