Houdini

Today marks 97 years since the death of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. His life story was loosely turned into a movie in the early 1950s with the unsurprising title Houdini. That movie is available on demand on Pluto TV, so I recently watched it since I figured Halloween was a suitable time to do a post on the movie.

Tony Curtis plays Harry Houdini (1874-1926), and as the movie opens he's working the carnival circuit as part of a show run by Schultz (Sig Ruman). Schultz doesn't necessarily care for Houdini's desire to do magic on stage, having hired him for other reasons. One evening at the show, in the audience is Bess Rahner (Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis' real-life wife at the time). Bess is infatuated with Harry, and keeps going to his shows, with him eventually getting her to realize that the two are in love, leading to an elopement, much to the chagrin of his mother (Angela Clark).

The two do traveling revues since Harry absolutely wants to make it as a magician, while Bess would be happy with him settling down and taking a normal job. After some abuse from a bunch of miners out west, Harry agrees, working in a lock and safe factory. But Harry still has the itch to do magic, so he takes his wife out to a gathering of the magicians' society for dinner. There, he goes up on stage to put on a strait-jacket, from which he's the only one to escape. His magic career is on its way.

Houdini's specialty becomes escape acts, escaping from handcuffs, locked boxes, submerged boxes, and a lot more. The career also takes him to Europe, where he hopes to meet a reclusive magician who supposedly learned the secret of dematerialization.

But them Mom dies, and Harry goes into a funk, not performing in public for years, wanting to make more contact with his mother. But Harry knows that the spiritualists who claim they can contact people on the other side are a bunch of fakes, so he decides he's going to debunk them publicly.

History tells us, however, that Houdini would die on Halloween in 1926. Houdini died from a ruptured appendix that wasn't diagnosed until too late, actually doing some shows with a high fever before dying in hospital. Not that this sort of death would be cinematic, however. So the movie portrays his death in a slightly different way....

Unsurprisingly, as with other Hollywood biopics of the era, this isn't the only liberty the movie takes with the truth. Despite the inaccuracies, Houdini is certainly an entertaining enough movie. Tony Curtis is a natural as Houdini, and Janet Leigh is appealing enough as his wife. The movie is also photographed in lovely Technicolor. In short, Houdini is good old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.