The Escapologist and the Automaton
There’s a lot of loose talk about how the long-running TV drama is the modern equivalent of the 19th century novel, with all the scope and sprawl, the ability to develop characters over time, to interweave complex plotlines and deliver startling pay-offs emotionally augmented by the sheer time spent with the dramatis personae.
This is a Golden Age for American TV. But I’d argue that a truer heir to the crown of Dickens, Eliot etc, is the movie serial, especially of the silent age. Unlike most long-form TV shows, these were written with finite story arcs, even if sometimes it seems like the authors were making the action up as they went along, which I’m sure to some extent they were. But the fact that everything is heading towards some at least partially predetermined conclusion, with at least some kind of rough road map to get there, makes them closer to Great Expectations than the extemporaneous space opera of Battlestar Galactica.
The big difference between The Master Mystery (1920), a fifteen-part (twelve hour) melodrama starring Harry Houdini, and the classics of Victorian literature, is one of quality. Serials are usually bad in just about every way imaginable, you see. Hoaky situations, flat characters, implausible character arcs, too much running around from one situation to the next without actually progressing anything, duff acting, prosaic filming. But not consistently or totally. By stringing together outrageous cliffhangers and convoluted mysteries, and setting up staunch heroes and dastardly villains (who keep winning until the final reel, however bravely the good guys struggle), the serials have a cunning way of keeping you hooked. But beyond that, they throw in regular moments of naïve genius.
I’d argue that every serial, in order to succeed, needs one bit of inspired casting, whether it be Eduardo Ciannelli as Dr Satan (The Mysterious Dr Satan) or Bela Lugosi as Dr Zorka (The Phantom Creeps). Usually the villain is the more important role to get right, some jut-jawed cipher being more than adequate to embody the hero, though the Flash Gordon serials had both Charles Middleton’s barnstorming faux-riental malevolence and Larry “Buster” Crabbe’s surprising sweetness as Flash to buoy them along.
The Master Mystery has Harry Houdini, and it has the Automaton.
Houdini was more famous for his escapology and stage magic than for his acting, but as his near-namesake and predecessor Robert Houdin said, “A magician is nothing but an actor playing the part of a magician.” Though his appearance, somewhat square and squat, with a wide face and a mass of frizzy hair which springs up in times of crisis, is not obviously heroic, Houdini makes a more than acceptable leading man, his performance natural and understated. The script assembles for him a complete catalogue of manly virtues, though his impeccable morals make him somewhat guileless and easy to trick. He acts at least as well as, say, Douglas Fairbanks. And the fight scenes in which he regularly becomes engaged (with the help of a cunningly inserted stunt double) are athletic, inventive and unusual.
As co-star and nemesis, we have the Automaton, purportedly the invention of the deranged Professor “Q”. It’s a delightful prototype of the kind of tin toy robot every schoolboy from the fifties to the seventies would covet. Although somehow in charge of a criminal gang, and constantly dreaming up evil schemes, it has a perky walk and cheerful manner that somehow makes it likable.
The plot of The Master Mystery is convoluted and at times confusing, at least in part because chunks of it - almost whole episodes - have gone missing over the years. What survives is in variable condition, with one long decorative streak of nitrate decomposition adding an additional layer of abstraction.
What this fragmented plot does allow is plenty of opportunity for daring escapes. Some of these are a trifle uncinematic, it’s true: Harry’s escape from a cave-in, consisting of nothing more than emerging from under some fake boulders, doesn’t seem to have the requisite panache of a daring feat. But one or two stunts are genuinely fascinating. The escape from “the Great Torture” features convincingly painful-looking handcuff tricks, and a truly uncomfortable encounter with a mechanized garrotte. Another scene has Harry, bound by the wrists to a high coat rack, throttle an opponent with his thighs, then kick of his shoes and socks and pick the unconscious thug’s pockets with his bare feet, before unlocking a nearby door with his toes and climbing it, monkey-fashion, so as to take the weight off his wrists and allow him to chew through his bonds. It’s thrilling to watch, even though the action is slow and systematic rather than blurry and frantic in the modern manner. It uses props and space and physical prowess in a way that seems almost extinct in action cinema since Jackie Chan decided he wanted to make it to old age more or less in one piece.
Before the comic book aesthetic set in, serials drew more from pulp fiction (Fantomas, Tarzan, Belphegor) than the funnies, and therefore limited their fantastical elements to one or two. The Master Mystery has poisoned candles which induce the dreaded “Madagascar Madness,” an evil hypnotist, a Chinese god statue with laser beam eyes, and numerous other crazy shenanigans, all of which are presented as if they’re admittedly unusual but certainly extant features of real life as we know it, or as the newspapers present it. Only the Automaton is considered a step beyond, and Harry soon defuses its mystique by asserting that it contains a human being.
This is a shame, in a way, since it disqualifies on a technicality the Automaton from being the screen’s first robot. That honor must fall to The Mechanical Man, produced in Italy the following year. (That film’s hulking mechanoid outruns a jalopy, and fights to the death with its steel twin. Gripping stuff.)
So the Automaton is really a disguise, at best a mechanical exoskeleton, like Iron Man. I won’t tell you who’s in there, though. You’ll have to see for yourselves.
by David Cairns