Unquestionably the most famous Houdini biopic is Paramount's 1953
HOUDINI starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. It's amazing just how many magic and Houdini buffs, including myself, cite this one film as the reason they became interested in the subject. And while
HOUDINI is almost entirely a work of fiction, it does capture the glamor, drama, and danger of Harry Houdini in a way that I think would have made the Master Mystifier proud.
The genesis of this classic movie lay with a pair of film industry novices. In 1950, a former drug store operator, Joseph Raboff, and a real estate man, Earl Cohen, formed a company called, Film Producers Inc., and acquired the film, radio, and TV rights to Houdini from the late magician's estate. They also acquired the rights to the book,
Houdini His Life Story
by Harold Kellock.
 |
| John Garfield |
Teaming with a former Paramount executive, Endre Bohem, the indie producers commissioned a screenplay by Stephen Longstreet (
The Jolsen Story
) and announced production of
The Life Story of Harry Houdini for October 1950 with either John Garfield or Lee Cobb in the lead role. There was also talk of a half-hour TV series following the film's release.
It's unclear what happened to Film Producers, Inc. ambitious project, but it's likely Raboff and Cohen found they had bitten off more than they could chew, and used Endre Bohem's connections to sell their valuable Houdini rights to Paramount.
The result was the big, bold Technicolor treat we know today as
HOUDINI. Producer George Pal and director George Marshall cast real-life husband and wife Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh in the roles of Harry and Bess Houdini. Angela Clarks plays "Mama", and Torin Thatcher plays Harry's fictional assistant and manager Otto. Dunninger receives a lavish credit as technical advisor, but according to Tony Curtis, the true technical advisor on the film was George Boston. "Dunninger was a blow hard," Curtis would tell a
Magic Castle audience in 2009. And speaking of The Magic Castle, that's co-founder Bill Larsen, Jr. (uncredited) performing the Guillotine act at the SAM convention in the film.
HOUDINI is mounted as a lavish magic show within a movie. Several magical effects are played out in their entirety and primarily in long shot. In fact, it plays as such a magic show, live audiences I've seen it with applaud the conclusion of each trick. As for the stars, Curtis and Leigh are nothing less than glamorous!
The film also beautifully recreates many of Houdini's most famous escapes, including the straitjacket escape both onstage and suspended, a safe escape, a metal straitjacket (said to be an authentic Houdini pro), a jail escape, and Houdini's ordeal trapped below the ice following his escape from a submerged metal box. This is one of the most dramatic and memorable scenes in the film, and while Houdini himself was responsible for this fiction, it was actually first slated to first appear in an unmade RKO film in 1932 (click here to read about
RKO 581: Hollywood's first Houdini film).
Most interesting to long-time fans of
HOUDINI is the recent revelation of several cut scenes. Set photos posted on the
LIFE magazine website show Curtis and Leigh performing the Cremation illusion, and a recreation of Houdini's Milk Can escape (the prop can used in the film now resides in the Houdini Seance Room at The Magic Castle). Also, the plane to plane transfer from Houdini's silent film
The Grim Game was re-staged on the Paramount backlot for this film, making it the only biopic to acknowledge Houdini's silent movie career (well, it made an attempt to, at least).
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| The Milk Can and Grim Game airplane stunt were cut from HOUDINI |
While
HOUDINI starts off light and breezy with wonderful romantic byplay between Harry and Bess, the movie actually grows quite dark as Harry's obsession gets the better of him. One of the best scenes in the film is when Harry and Bess have an argument in an empty theater with a bubbling Water Torture Cell in the background (here called the Pagoda Torture Cell). "I wish it was another woman who took you from me, Harry, that I can fight. This I can't," says Bess. Faced with losing his wife, Harry promises to cut the Cell from his show.
However, on show day, Harry cannot resist the cheers of the audience and the cries of "more", and brings out the bubbling cell for an encore. But a tender appendix and an accidental blow backstage (he walks into a prop sword) weakens him and he becomes trapped in the cell and drowns before Bess and the horrified audience (establishing a myth that persists to this day that Houdini died in the Water Torture Cell). As his limp body is dragged from the smashed cell, the camera drifts off the dying magician to his first innocent magic poster and we are reminded just how far Houdini has traveled in pursuit of applause. It's a remarkably dark and tragic ending that makes a powerful impact.
HOUDINI was well received by the critics of the day. However, the magic community was less enamored. Magician and Houdini biographer Milbourne Christopher (
Houdini The Untold Story) led the charge in a review that took the movie to task for its many fictions and inaccuracies. Said Christopher, "I won't attempt to list the anachronisms and inaccuracies in the film. Generally speaking, if any phase of Houdini's life is shown on the screen you can be sure it didn't happen the way it's pictured."
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| HOUDINI on TV |
Perhaps this attitude is understandable. The magic community had waited years for a Houdini biopic, and one could see how a largely fictional treatment would disappoint. Of course, no one then had any idea just how influential the film would be, and how many magicians and Houdini enthusiasts it was inspire. In that regard, Paramount's 1953
HOUDINI is certainly the most successful of
all the Houdini movies.
Happily,
HOUDINI is also the most accessible of all the Houdini movies. It has been released on
VHS
, LaserDisc, and
DVD
. The film is often shown on television, and is even periodically screened in theaters. In the final years of his life,
HOUDINI was one of the films that Tony Curtis was most fondly remembered and celebrated.
Be sure and check out Shep Hyken's wonderful website devoted entirely to
Houdini - The Movie.
There's a must read post today over at Carnegie: Magic Detective about Houdini and President Abraham Lincoln. Dean contends (and I concur) that Lincoln, not Robert-Houdin, was Houdini's true boyhood hero.
and Escape from New York
, Houdini buffs know her best as the seductress Daisy White in the 1976 TV movie The Great Houdinis (a movie we love around here).the same way you do a stage play. We just rehearsed for 4 1/2 days and then did it for an audience straight through, no stops or anything. So we did the master...the first establishing shot...on Houdini...and I didn't know that people did close-ups. I went off and started to change clothes to do the next scene! (Laughs.)
fan!
.
by Agnieszka Biskup with illustrations by Pat Kinsella.
on January 2, 2011.
. The small amount of footage that survives appears to have come from the 1950 feature documentary, The Golden Twenties.
) sends over the Weed Chain Tire Grip Co's own account of the challenge from their company pitchbook, The Weed. (This also recently appeared on Kevin Connolly's superb blog, Houdini Himself.) One interesting revelation is that Houdini repeated the escape a second time in Philadelphia.
“I started my research mainly using the internet and old magazines. I managed to obtain one page of three-view drawings and some useful articles from the internet, including pictures of the aereoplane, some with Harry Houdini in view.” 
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