Escape From The Vaults Of History!

For nearly five years, beginning in 1918, Harry Houdini — the most famous magician since Merlin, most fabled escapologist since Jonah, most resourceful publicist since Barnum — tried his hand at filmmaking. He starred in one 15-chapter, five-hour serial and four feature-length films (a rumored fifth feature, “The Soul of Bronze,” probably wasn’t made and almost certainly wasn’t distributed), at times involving himself as a producer, writer, and director.Houdini displayed little cinematic aptitude, yet the viewer who plunges, handcuffed or not, into Kino’s new three-disc DVD tribute, “Houdini the Movie Star,” may surface with the showman’s grim, stocky, square-faced, curly-haired, gimlet-eyed glare forever locked in memory, like an unshakable specter from the past. Houdini was no actor, but he had presence. At times, he resembles a more muscular, Semitic-looking cousin to the mute magician-comedian Teller. With this set, Houdini’s flirtation with spiritualism is rewarded after all — the legend of long ago retakes his corporeal self. Welcome back.Maybe Houdini — who was born Ehrich Weiss, in Budapest, in 1874, and died on Halloween, 1926, in Detroit, the victim of a college student who tested the magician’s legendary abdominal muscles by pounding them — planned it this way. In “The Man From Beyond” (1922), which he wrote and produced, Houdini appears as Howard Hillary, a first mate left for dead on the abandoned deck of his ship, moored in the Arctic sea in 1820. As the years pass, Hillary becomes encased in a block of ice, standing like Frankenstein’s monster.The discovery of his frozen visage startles two survivors of another Arctic voyage, in 1920. They chip him out, give him a cup of thawing java, learn his backstory from a convenient letter, and decide it would be best not to tell him that the clock has moved forward 100 years. Hillary had (almost) perished to aid his beloved Felice (Jane Connelly), and his saviors don’t think he’ll be able to handle the knowledge that Felice didn’t enjoy an equally cryogenic transition.So they take him to New York, to the home of Dr. Crawford Strange (Albert Tavernier). Hillary still thinks he’s in the 1820s, and fails to notice little things that might upend the deception — such as the bulb-like appurtenances that have replaced candles. As it happens, the daughter of Dr. Strange who, at the moment of Hillary’s arrival, is preparing to wed a sneering scoundrel named Trent (Arthur Maude), is also named Felice. Since Felice I and Felice II are both played by vaudevillian Connelly (whose only other movie role was as the mother in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.”), Hillary is agitated. The medics helpfully take him to a sanatorium, place him in a straitjacket, and nail him to the ground.The denouement involves some vamping by the popular ’20s actress Nita Naldi, a telltale rat, a secret cellar, and an ambiguous rescue from the precipice of Niagara Falls. It also tips its hat to Houdini’s fellow spiritualist, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was gratified despite Houdini’s constant debunking of mediums, including Mrs. Doyle, who rather imprudently claimed to channel Houdini’s dead mother. The point, though, isn’t that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of or channeled.The point, according to the prologue in James Cruze’s flatly directed “Terror Island” (1920), a cross between “Treasure Island,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and diverse colonialist exploits, is: “While melodrama is not taken seriously by all spectators, it is of interest to know that Houdini, world-famous for his exploits as a self-liberator, actually performed the amazing feats here pictured.” In short, the producers concede that this is the lowest sort of hokum, but who cares? Houdini had been a phenomenon for two decades: His movies existed only to get him into bondage from which he could wriggle free.Oddly enough, this conceit may be more entertaining now than it was to his contemporaries. His most effective stunts are of theDouglas Fairbanks variety, demonstrating Houdini’s fearless athleticism. But the ones for which he was famous — writhing out of a straitjacket while hanging upside down, breaking out of a safe on the ocean floor, undoing the straps of an electric chair seconds before the zap — have a cinematic veracity on par with radio ventriloquism.Maybe these stunts weren’t simulated, but they could have been, and a few were — including the only surviving snippet from “The Grim Game” (1919), in which a genuine midair plane collision was turned to advantage as the hero, Harvey Hanford, emerged triumphant from the rubble. Contrary to production claims, Houdini did occasionally use a double, Bob Rose, who later became part of John Ford’s team. Usually, Houdini was unmistakably the fellow at risk, but we don’t really see what he’s doing — one minute he’s bound; the next, he isn’t.It doesn’t matter. The pleasure of watching these films parallels the journey of the time traveler in Houdini’s iceman cometh saga, “The Man From Beyond.” Hillary leaps forward 100 years. We go in the other direction — to a world of hat-wearers, when the conventions of penny-dreadful fictions were remade to accompany technophobia, when genetics were so mysterious that bloodlines were constantly up for grabs, and xenophobia was acceptable foreign policy.In “Terror Island,” Houdini played “the noted philanthropist and inventor” Harry Harper, who battles both superstitious savages (“Chief Bakaida, who glories in the fact that he can ‘spik Ingrish'”) and the “meanest man in town,” one Job Mordaunt, who laughs when a little waif skins her knees. (Harper’s son is played by Eugene Palette, the fat, froggy-voiced comic foil in 1930s screwball comedies.) In Houdini’s halfhearted but thematically interesting last film, “Haldane of the Secret Service” (1923), he plays Heath Haldane, the scourge of counterfeiters, who is menaced by the Yellow Peril, which turns out to be under the command of a white man in YP drag.The most remarkable Houdini film is the 1920 serial and box-office success “The Master Mystery.” An hour is missing, filled in with brief summaries, but they aren’t necessary: In every chapter, the bad guys overpower Quentin Locke (Houdini’s only alphabetically imaginative alter ego), and leave him alone to escape their increasingly desperate constraints. In one situation, he has to finesse an intricate web of ropes before an acid slick reaches his prone body — prefiguring Goldfinger’s castrating laser. Yet the overarching plot is far from simplistic. It charts the intricate offenses of a monstrous criminal who — are you seated? — violates the anti-trust laws!Part of his plan requires infecting his enemies with Madagascar Madness, which has the same effect as laughing gas. The criminal is aided by an “automaton,” a year before Karel Capek coined the work “robot.” It isn’t the first mechanical man on film (Georges Méliès invented one in 1897), but it may be the first with star potential — a cross between Gort and Robbie, with googly eyes. The final chapters could serve as an old Sid Caesar sketch, as each character turns out to be the secret child, parent, or sibling of the others — fortunately averting incest while enriching all the principals.“The Master Mystery” united Houdini with two men who, like him, did their best work away from movies. The chief writer was Arthur B. Reeve, who helped invent detective pulp fiction and true-crime reportage; his ripping novelization of “The Master Mystery” reads like the Hardy Boys on speed. The film’s producer was the trumpet virtuoso and dance-band leader B.A. Rolfe, who inspired Louis Armstrong to perfect the instrument’s upper range. (Armstrong cited his 1929 “When You’re Smiling” solo as his homage to Rolfe.)An on-screen essay in “Houdini the Movie Star” notes that the film elements are below Kino’s usual standards, but this homage requires no apology. In addition to virtually unknown and unseen films, the set includes every scrap of newsreel footage, an Edison recording of Houdini’s voice (he sounds like a carny barker), and other related oddities. Kino ought to have included an essay summarizing Houdini’s life for those to whom his name is an undefined cliché, but even without it, this collection has succeeded in bringing life to the long-ago hero of a long-ago time.Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”

Escape From The Vaults Of History!

Escape From The Vaults Of History!

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