The Great Houdini Goes to Hollywood
Harry Houdini began his career as a magician performing card tricks with his brother on the midway of the 1893 World’s Fair. By the early 1900s he was well on his way to becoming an international superstar by escaping from handcuffs, manacles, safes, jail cells, sealed milk cans filled with water, and straitjackets (while dangling upside down six stories above a busy street). He was an undisputed king of the vaudeville stage, drawing huge audiences and demanding top dollar. But that was only the first phase of his strange and unpredictable career.
Contrary to the general mythology, Houdini didn’t begin his investigation into spiritualist charlatans (putting him in the headlines again and giving his career a second wind) immediately after the death of his beloved mother in 1913. No, there was a ten-year lag there most people overlook. And for at least a few of those years, the world’s most famous magician and escapologist tried really, really hard to make it in the movies. He had his reasons.
Vaudeville helped make Houdini a kind of early 20th century superhero and one of the most recognizable men in the world. As with so many other performers, though, the increasing popularity of the moving pictures was putting a serious crimp in his income as audiences dwindled and venues disappeared. For all those other jugglers, comedians, and singers, the move into films was simply a logical progression necessary to save their livelihoods. Most failed and disappeared. Houdini’s motivation was a little different. After all, convenient as vaudeville theaters were, he could perform his milk bottle and straitjacket escapes most anywhere and draw a paying crowd. But by 1920 the escapes were beginning to take a serious physical toll. He was tired and sore and had suffered too many broken bones. Ah, but the thinking was, see, that if he put these escapes on film, preserved them forever that way, he wouldn’t have to do them anymore. Just send the movies around, let audiences see him pull off these same escapes perfectly as many times as they like, and still get paid for it as he relaxed at home drinking daiquiris.
Houdini was always on the lookout for new media to conquer, so the possibilities of film were brewing early. In 1906 he began projecting short films of some of his outdoor escapes before taking the stage himself to perform his vaudeville act. In 1909, he made a 10-minute film which would become his standard audience warm-up for the next several years. In the silent Pathe short Houdini wanders the streets of Paris, protests a policeman’s treatment of a drunk, is arrested himself, and breaks out of jail. What follows is a chase across the city in which Houdini performs assorted escapes around various Parisian landmarks (like the morgue) before leaping into the Seine, where he escapes from two pairs of handcuffs and the police. Not much acting is involved, just a lot of running and escaping.
It was a simple and clever promo film used to prime an audience the same way so many bands (the Stones, DEVO, Weird Al) have been using pre-concert videos since the ‘80s. A decade after the Paris short, Houdini decided it was time to take the serious Hollywood plunge. Now, no one wanted to see the short, squat, Houdini in a romantic melodrama of course, so after plans for a silent version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea with Houdini starring as Capt. Nemo fell through, he was handed a new, more appropriate vehicle.
The Master Mystery was a silent 15-part fantasy adventure serial in which Houdini stars as Quentin Lock (get it?), a federal agent trying to infiltrate an international criminal syndocate controlled by an evil genius of a robot, The Automaton. The syndicate is in possession of a poisonous gas known as the Madagascar Madness and so of course needs to be stopped before it can wreak any havoc. Given he could perform most of his own onscreen stunts, giving the film that Harold Lloyd/Buster Keaton air but without, y’know, the laughs, Houdini faced death and impossible escapes on a weekly basis.
(For more details, please see David Cairns’ wonderful Chiseler article, “The Escapologist and the Automaton.”)
The Master Mystery remains the best and best remembered of Houdini’s films. As an actor Houdini may not have been a silent era Adrian Brody (or Tony Curtis, or Paul Michael Glaser), but to be fair none of them are Houdini either, and watching him perform these stunts without a curtain is at times simply amazing.
The success of the serial led to a multi-picture deal with Paramount, and later that same year Houdini made a feature, The Grim Game, which suffered a more notorious fate. The plot is pretty standard for the times: Houdini plays a man falsely accused of murder who must break out of prison (using a slew of magic and escape tricks) before tracking down the gang that not only framed him, but is currently holding his gal captive. During the production, two biplanes (one with a man dangling beneath it) collided in midair during a stunt, killing everyone involved. The producers made the most of it, writing the accident into the script and feeding the press the story it was actually Houdini himself dangling from that plane (it wasn’t). Thanks mostly to its use in newsreels, that five minutes of footage involving the plane crash is the only scrap left today of The Grim Game.
Things began straying into the stranger with 1920’s Terror Island, directed by James Crew. This time around Houdini is an inventor named Harry Harper (get it?), who flies to a remote, primitive island in search of a treasure supposedly buried there by his girlfriend, Beverly (silent film ingenue Lila Lee) There’s another motivation driving him to the island, though, as it seems Bev’s father is being held captive by a tribe of cannibals who are pissed shestole a sacred pearl, and won’t release her father until it’s returned. Or something like that. Having by this time already committed a number of escapes to film for posterity (even if those in The Grim Game would be lost down the line), the films edged deeper into genre fantasies, with Houdini fighting crocodiles instead of escaping from handcuffs.
The next year, seeing more control and more money in the prospect, Houdini left Paramount and formed his own production company in upstate NY,. His first release as writer and producer, 1922’s The Man from Beyond, was both the most traditionally melodramatic of all his movies, and the most revealing (if ham-fisted) in biographical terms given his growing obsession with spiritualism.
This time Houdini is Howard Hillary (get it?), an arctic explorer whose ship gets lost during an expedition. A century later the ship is discovered frozen in a block of ice with an equally frozen Houdini still aboard. After being thawed out and adjusting some to a world a hundred years older than when he last saw it,he sets out to find his one true love, the woman who was apparently aboard the ship when it was lost. He finds a woman he believes to be his former fiancee (close enough, anyway) and even though she’s engaged to someone else insists on rescuing her from assorted moustache-twirling ne’er-do-wells and deadly perils (even saving her At The Last Moment from being swept over Niagara Falls). All the while, he attempts to convince her she is, in fact, the same woman he was supposed to marry a century earlier. The possibilities of such a thing are discussed at length, some by-the-numbers metaphysics is bandied about concerning the crossover between the spiritual and the physical and so forth. It all comes off a bit like Houdini thinking aloud (or in intertitles) about his own research into the occult and the growing spiritualist movement.
He would make (and this time co-direct as well as write) one last film, 1923’s Haldane of the Secret Service, which in many ways was a return to his beginnings movie-wise, and in others just a complete desperate jumble. This time around as Heath Haldane (yes, well), he’s chasing a band of ruthless and vicious counterfeiters (!) while also trying to rescue his girlfriend (even though she’s engaged to someone else and may or may not be in cahoots with the counterfeiters). There’s not much by way of pacing or character development here, of that’s what you were looking for. It’s a pretty sluggish mish-mash of tired ideas, many feeling like they were lifted from other, unfinished projects. weirdest thing of all is that Houdini himself is given so little to do. He beats up some counterfeiters, I guess. He’s tied to a water wheel in one sequence, but a water wheel that never actually touches the water. Even then he only escapes when the wheel breaks on its own. You get the sense he was bord, or tired, or distracted, or just sick of the whole business.
In any case after four years Houdini found it much easier to escape from the movie industry than from the Chinese Water Torture stunt he’d devised. The deeply arrogant Houdini (which is neither here nor there, he earned his arrogance), never one to admit failure, later wrote that he’d left the movie business because it didn’t pay enough. Other, perhaps more clear-eyed observers have speculated that a more realistic reason might be that Houdini was a wooden and unconvincing actor when not performing escapes, that he was in a string of pretty terrible movies, and that fewer and fewer people were going to see them.
It doesn’t much matter, since as his film career petered out, he began his barnstorming tour of debunkery, criss-crossing America laying bare the cheap gimmickery and outright fraud of the spiritualist business. It put him back on top again, and eventually landed him on Broadway with a hugely popular show. It lasted for awhile anyway, until he got punched in the stomach and died on halloween, 1926, three years after his final film was released.
by Jim Knipfel