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Houdini: The Movie Star (Three-Disc Collection)

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When I was a kid in the late 50s, Houdini was still THE man. Escape artist, illusionist and master magician, Harry Houdini fired our youthful imaginations almost as no other - even though we had almost never seen him except in faded stills or old newsreels. We certainly never heard him speak, but had only read avidly about his past exploits.

Now, Kino International is giving Houdini back to his legions of devoted fans by releasing a three-DVD set that includes ALL of the surviving silent movie films of "Houdini - the actor," as well as footage of escapes and an audio clip of the master's voice!

More than mere entertainment, this wonderful collection is truly an historical presentation of Houdini's film career.

By 1919, Houdini was known internationally as an unparalleled master magician. Having conquered the stage, he set out to do the same thing to the "new" medium of the day - the movie. Houdini appeared in a series of thrillers built upon his almost supernatural powers, which he performed the majority of the stunts himself in all of his films.

This incredible boxed set represents the first time that these images (except for "The Man from Beyond") have ever been released on DVD, and may very well be the first time a lot of fans have seen these wonderful productions in more than 75 years!!

Kino International culled everything it could find from film archives and private collections to gather and remaster this amazing material. It includes all of Houdini's surviving silent films as an actor, rare footage of actual handcuff and straitjacket escapes, as well as a wealth of historical information. It also includes a serial in which may have been the first-ever robot on screen to be a threat.

Included in this DVD set is: The Master Mystery (1919, 238m, Color Tinted), a cliff-hanging serial in which Justice Department Agent Quentin Locke (Houdini) must investigate a powerful cartel protected by a robot (referred to as "The Automation") and using a gas weapon "The Madagascar Madness"; Terror Island (1920, 55m, B&W), which involves an inventor of a submarine (Houdini), a damsel in distress, her captured father, hostile natives on an island, a family of villains and some shipwrecked treasure; The Man From Beyond (1922, 68m, Color Tinted), which includes a jail type escape, a fist fight with Houdini winning of course, and a sensational scene with Houdini swimming the rapids at Niagara Falls; Haldane of the Secret Service (1923, 84m, Color Tinted), Heath Haldane (Houdini) tracks down a vicious gang of counterfeiters, narrowly missing death several times. He must rescue Adele Ormsby, whom he loves despite her pending marriage; and The Grim Game (Fragment, 1919, 5m, Color Tinted), a film that featured a famous jump from the wings of one plane to another, and the first in-air plane collision ever recorded by a movie camera.

Special Features include filmed records of Houdini escapes (ca. 1907-23); an audio recording of Houdini speaking (1914); Excerpts from the NY Censor Board files; Slippery Jim, a 1910 Houdini-inspired comedy; and the illusion Metamorphosis performed by Houdini's beloved brother Hardeen, and others.

Beyond recommended!!

Everyone who is interested in Houdini, even casually, should buy this three DVD set of extremely rare footage of the great star. It is a wonderful set. To those interested in early cinema, the silent screen, vaudeville, sci-fi/fantasy, and superheroes this set is invaluable. Now, I want to talk about something which is very important to me. There has never been a collection of Houdini film footage before. KINO has created a beautiful product in "Houdini, the Movie Star." In doing so, they call our attention to footage that is missing. That is what I want to discuss.
In the KINO set, there is a great deal of footage I've never seen before, and this is Houdini's Ghost speaking. One bit of film shows Houdini running through a park in Paris. Two pairs of handcuffs are locked on his wrists. He stops at the wall outside the Paris morgue, strips off his clothes to his boxer trunks, then climbs a gate and stands atop of the wall of the morgue. Then he jumps into the river Seine.
He surfaces a couple of times before he frees himself from the cuffs, then, he swims to the opposite shore where men are waiting for him. They throw a coat over his shoulders and hustle him into a car which drives away, pursued by four French policemen who look very much like Keystone cops.
Here's the point: in 1909, Houdini starred in a 10 minute Pathe short. I have never seen the opening sequence, but some private collectors do have it and I have been told that Houdini is seen on a street in Paris. He observes a Parisian policeman arresting a drunk. Houdini protests the treatment of the drunk and is arrested himself. The next segment I have seen. Houdini is taken inside the police station and tied to a chair. A policeman sits in a chair nearby and dozes off, and Houdini escapes from the ropes and ties up the sleeping cop.
I've also seen the next segment in which Houdini is strapped in a straitjacket and locked in a padded cell. He escapes. Apparently, what follows is the piece of film in the KINO special features in which Houdini, handcuffed, jumps into the Seine. To my knowledge, all these segments have never been put together, or rather, put back together.
There are two shots missing from the Paris Seine footage in the KINO set. One is a close-up of the cuffs on Houdini's wrists as he stands atop the wall. The other is the actual shot of him jumping into the water. The missing shots are acknowledged in the DVD. I happen to know where those two shots are. They were used in a BBC documentary on Houdini back around 1976. I remember the filmmakers insisting on first-generation footage. Somebody cut those shots from the Paris footage to be used in the BBC documentary, and they never got put back.
Likewise, there is footage missing from "the Master Mystery." We see, for example, Houdini placed in a packing box and thrown off a pier. An inserted title card explains that Houdini escapes underwater. Well, the underwater shot was also used in the BBC documentary. And also never replaced.
Probably the man responsible for scattering so many elements of the "Master Mystery" to the four winds was Ray Rohauer, who can also be thanked for removing three chapters out of the 15 chapter Serial, and losing them. At one time, Houdini performed approximately two escapes per episode. Many of them are now missing. A particularly unfortunate loss was of a chain escape Houdini performed. I also missed seeing a scene in which Houdini is locked in a jail cell. He stares at the keyhole and we get an x-ray view of the lock as his mind causes the bolt to open.
This lost Houdini footage may still exist in private collections. What must happen is that collectors must unselfishly help to gather the distaff elements together. In the KINO Houdini DVD set, are five minutes of the feature length Houdini film "the Grim Game." Actually, an hour long version of that film still exists and a man who considers himself Houdini's greatest fan has been sitting on it for 50 years. Incidentally, while collectors hoard their Houdini film footage, it is dying.
In 1976, a film archive, Sherman Grinberg, screened about an hour of Houdini footage for me when I was technical advisor on a TV movie about him. A couple of years later, I tried to get another screening, but, the nitrate film had shrunk and would be too expensive to try to salvage. When the director/writer Mel Shavelson went to Houdini collector Larry Weeks to look at some very rare footage, they found that quite a bit of it had degenerated to a volatile goo.
I have a special perspective about this lost Houdini footage. Back in the late fifties, I saw the entire 15 chapters of Master Mystery twice and each chapter was complete and intact. We are losing these films almost faster than anybody can rescue them, but, we all should make an effort to save every scrap of film we possibly can.

This DVD set falls under the "I did not know it still existed" category. I am a Houdini Nut and I had to see what I thought was gone forever. Well, it almost should be. What has survived and re released is in pretty bad shape. Most of one serial, a late movie Houdini pieced together and a few newsreel shots of his actual escapes. And a French cartoon so unrelated as to be absurd. The newsreel bits of upside down straight jacket escapes sort of redeem it. A 2 DVD set might be be a better concept. Maybe one? This is not for light entertainment. Serious students only.

Kino's new set HOUDINI: THE MOVIE STAR is a three disc collection of just about everything that Houdini did which still survives. HH made 5 films over a 5 year period (1919-1923). His first effort THE MASTER MYSTERY is a serial which survives mostly intact. It's also a rare opportunity to see Mae Marsh's older sister Marguerite in action and she's pretty good given the material.

Of the other four only his last effort HALDANE OF THE SECRET SERVICE is fully complete. 1919's THE GRIM GAME has only about 5 minutes but it contains an actual midair collision which was left in the film. THE MAN FROM BEYOND is Houdini's best known film and the 16mm copy here is much better than any of the previous video incarnations. The story of a man revived after being frozen for 100 years has been reworked many times and is never less than fascinating. The highlight of the collection is TERROR ISLAND. Although missing reels 3 and 4 it has the advantage of high production values (it was made at Paramount), a quality director in James Cruze (THE COVERED WAGON), and a cast of strong supporting players led by Eugene Pallette (he was Friar Tuck in Errol Flynn's ROBIN HOOD) whose career stretched into the 1940s.

The set comes with lots of extras including actual clips of Houdini performing and an audio recording of him advertising his act from 1914. As a performer Houdini was charismatic but his films suffer from the same plots and stunts used over and over again. If you've seen one, you've seen em' all. Nevertheless this is a valuable piece of celluloid history and is certainly worth having for the discriminating collector or silent film lover. Just don't expect something "magical".

Harry Houdini is still remembered today as one of the greatest magicians and escape artists of all time, and now - a century later - Kino Video has given him an exceptionally fine tribute in this very nice set of three DVDs, each in their individual slimline cases with original old and colourful artwork. World-famous since the late 1800s for his seemingly superhuman feats of slipping out of handcuffs, ropes and straitjackets, Houdini was already in his mid-40s when he decided that the burgeoning motion picture industry could do wonders for his career and image, and for a few years it certainly did. Due to his untimely death in 1926, his film career produced only a handful of feature films and one serial, all of which have now been collected and preserved in this interesting set. Although only a few minutes of footage survive of one film ("The Grim Game") and others are missing scenes or complete reels, they have been carefully restored so that we can enjoy Houdini's stunts and tricks just as earlier generations did a century ago.

Intending to capitalize on his fame as an escapist, his first film venture featured such escape stunts prominently, namely in almost every episode of the 15-part serial, "The Master Mystery". Missing a few episodes, it is still four hours worth of viewing in this set and has explanatory notes to fill the gaps, as well as excellent general notes about Houdini and his career, stills and other great bonus material. The serial is not unlike the action-packed adventure serials popular at that time, such as "The Perils of Pauline" in which the hero or heroine must get out of a dangerous situation in every episode until the mystery of the criminal masterminds is finally solved. In "The Master Mystery", Houdini tries to solve a criminal case, but is repeatedly caught and then either wrapped in barbed wire, tied into an electric chair and many other tight situations, as well as being stalked by a dangerous robot or `automaton'. Needless to say, he frees himself from every such evil and torturous device with apparently sheer determination, together with considerable physical strength and dexterity, rather than any special effect or trickery.

After the success of this serial in 1919, Houdini played very similar straight-faced action hero roles in feature films, solving crimes and mysteries and getting the girl in the end. While generally standard action-adventure films, each one is different and features a certain interesting theme, such as "The Man from Beyond" which I found most intriguing for its concept about coming back to life in another time. In this setting, Houdini has been frozen in a shipwreck in the Arctic for a hundred years, but is brought back to life and finds a girl he believes is the reincarnation of his beloved from a century ago. There are also special, thrilling stunts and action scenes, once again highlighting Houdini's escapism feats. The last film Houdini made, "Haldane of the Secret Service" had less stunts and feats, and emphasized the story of a clever counterfeiting racket which Houdini is determined to solve while also winning the girl. Although standard fare, the films are all entertaining and interesting, and each one has a different musical score; piano, organ or orchestral, with overall good picture quality throughout. Houdini himself may not look the part of the typical action hero because he is neither particularly tall, muscular nor handsome, nor does he demonstrate any special acting skills, but his character does grow on you after a while. Among the bonus material I found a few gems I really enjoyed, such as a 1910 French Pathe comedy based on Houdini's feats, only comically exaggerated by the use of unusual special effects and film trickery, which was common in the very first years of moving pictures. There is also a short audio track of Houdini introducing one of his famous acts, as well as other short film footage of his various stunts, mostly getting out of a straitjacket while hanging by his ankles high above a busy street. Overall, it is a charming glimpse back into the past to see a legend close-up in silent films, and maybe this set fulfils Houdini's theory or plan to come back from the dead - one way or another!

This amazing collection is a dream come true for the Houdini buff. The set includes four of the five silent films Houdini made between 1918 and 1923, and fragment from the still lost 'The Grim Game' featuring that film's most amazing moment, a real mid-air plane collision caught on camera. The most significant film here is 'Haldane of the Secret Service' which has never before appeared on any retail format (and is a much better film, IMO, than it's reputation would suggest).

While the films are terrific, true gold is contained in the extras. Here we have loads of real footage of Houdini's street escapes, including some incredible footage of Houdini doing bridge jumps in his prime (circa 1903). Also, the written films notes are very well done, and are as complete as any section on Houdini's film career as can be found in any of the major biographies. In fact, they are more complete. The account of Houdini's battle with the New York censors over 'The Man From Beyond' is something I had never heard before.

THANK YOU Kino for this great gift to all magic and silent movie enthusiasts. Here's hoping one day you find a complete print of 'The Grim Game' so you can complete the collection.

Before there was Superman, created by a couple of Jewish guys in the 1930s as a modern, pulp-fiction Sampson in brightly colored tights and cape -- there was a real Jewish Superman. And, finally thanks to this Kino DVD set, he's springing back to life in a way that would have made Harry Houdini grin!

For the first time in the lives of American Baby Boomers, we can see Houdini's entire, surviving legacy on film.

This is one heck of a story!

It starts with a little Jewish immigrant named Erich Weiss, the son of a rabbi -- who, even when he reached adulthood, stood 5-foot-5. At the height of his powers, dressed immaculately in suit and tie with the air of a college professor or perhaps a famous doctor -- "Harry Houdini" loved to stage public displays of his powers in the busy streets just outside major newspaper offices.

He liked to work with tall policemen, who would tower over him as they threw him into these dangerous scrapes. Seeing Houdini's little, noble form with his wise, highly cultured face set off by his perfectly knotted ties -- it is quite a jolt to watch these big bruisers encircle him. They actually toss him to and fro as they pull the restraints as tightly as possible around his body.

This all contributes to the awesome wonder of Houdini's escapes.

Yes, it's true: Houdini also was famous as a magician and everyone knew that his theatrical shows were illusions. There's a little of that in this set, but not much.

It was Houdini's amazing physical accomplishments on land, in the air and under water -- real, life-and-death threats to the man himself -- that made him world famous.

Those accomplishments include his cinematic career. These films display Houdini at the peak of his power, shaped by his sheer force of will, physical training, personal charisma and a clever understanding of the psychology of his foes.

Remember that Houdini died in 1926, before the "sound era" in Hollywood. So all of these films are silent (with musical scores, of course). And the longest film really is a nearly forgotten genre: the weekly serial.

If you've never seen a Hollywood serial, then you're in for a treat. They weren't called "cliff hangers" for nothing! The genre later was perfected through the 1930s and 1940s until it eventually spilled over into network television series. It's the concept behind the hugely popular "Indiana Jones" and "Star Wars" series.

In this Houdini collection, the 1919 serial "Master Mystery" clocks in at nearly four hours for all of the serialized episodes. And, it's a great showcase for Houdini's physical abilities.

If you're a real Houdini buff, fascinated with his later work on debunking psychics while also exploring life after death, then "The Man from Beyond" is a revelation. It's a story of a man, entirely frozen in ice in a ship-board disaster, who many years later is discovered, revived, brought back to civilization -- and must come to terms with this strange transformation beyond death itself. Houdini clearly put a lot of creative effort into this film, including beautifully designed title cards. But, frankly, it's a little slow sledding for modern viewers. There's more mature artistry here - less Houdini-style action.

The gem here - and you'll need to get past the early-Hollywood convention of picking exotic-looking minority groups as stock villains - is "Terror Island." This is a rare feature film, some of which is missing and is replaced by explanatory text - but what's been preserved is stunning. Houdini plays a close-to-superhuman scientist who performs amazing feats under water, suspended in the air, high on a mountain - and winds up both marrying the true-hearted girl and helping orphans as well.

Perhaps the most haunting footage in the entire set is a series of film clips of Houdini's public escapes. If you're a teacher or student interested in 20th-Century cultural history, those clips alone are worth the price of the set.

These have been all but lost to most movie goers for nearly a century. Now that Kino has brought them back to life so vividly - and conveniently - for all of us, it's a must-own set for those of us who love cinema. And, in this case, the haunting story behind Houdini and these films should fuel a lot of intriguing discussion.

Harry Houdini never really got away with the movie career he craved, but not for want of trying. That it was more chequered than his stage one was due to a combination of censorship and distribution problems (he often chose to work on independent films that sold rights state-by-state), the inevitable lawsuits over the profits and his own ego preventing him from pushing himself beyond his perceived comfort zone - which, curiously, was to avoid repeating his most famous stage stunts onscreen that could have made him a unique early action hero in favour of roles stressing his scientific and crime-solving interests. It's not helped that only one of his films survives completely intact, though Kino have done a good job of collecting what survives of all of them on their Houdini the Movie Star collection, pasting over the gaps with stills and (often rather too brief and undetailed) captions. Both print quality and the editing are highly variable, but it's enough to get a good impression of Houdini's strengths and weaknesses. He's not the handsomest of leading men or a great actor - as one critic noted, he alternates between three stock expressions while Variety cruelly but accurately said "the only asset he has in the acting line is his ability to look alert" - but he does have presence and a self-belief that carries him through the melodramatic plots.

The Master Mystery was a serial that saw him as a undercover government agent Qentin Locke, trying to bust a corporation that buys up patents for groundbreaking inventions and then buries them in return for money from the companies they threaten to ruin if they hit the market. It pretty much adheres to the tone of the decades of serials that would follow with its mysterious unidentified master criminal - masquerading as a robot, `The Automaton' - and in feeling dragged out at 15 chapters, so it's small wonder that many distributors shortened it, with only the shorter versions surviving, losing some of the more interesting sounding stunts and escapes (sadly, all that survives of an escape that sees Houdini suspended above a vat of acid is a fragment in the supplementary `Censor's Report' feature listing the many censor cuts the series went through). Most of Houdini's escapes here seem to involve an awful lot of frantic shaking around, but some of them are a bit more intricate and occasionally fascinating to watch. But much of the series is taken up with romantic complications and such staples of melodrama as amnesiac fathers, lost daughters, disputed inheritances, poisoned potions and caddish suitors. It's the kind of serial that's probably a lot easier to take spread over 15 weeks than watched in on go, but it's also the only one of his screen outings that features plenty of the kind of great escapes that made his name.

Made for Paramount and with noticeably better production and story values, Terror Island may well be his most enjoyable film, though two reels of what sounds like fun stuff is still missing, leaving a big gap in the film's narrative. It's a silly treasure hunt yarn, with Houdini the inventor of a revolutionary submarine who sets out to rescue the father of the woman he loves from the tropical island natives who want to sacrifice him while her duplicitous relatives want to use him as bait to get their hands on the treasure he uncovered. The surviving stunts - particularly an escape from being suspended by poles from a tree - are good and James Cruze's direction makes sure that Houdini is surrounded by a decent cast (a villainous Eugene Palette among them) in decent settings to prevent it seeming too much of a one-man show. Audiences at the time didn't agree, the disappointing box-office leading to Houdini going back to independent production.

For many, The Man from Beyond is probably the best-known of Houdini's films, if only because its Niagara Falls finale was included on the 1961 Robert Youngson compilation Days of Thrills and Laughter. Certainly it seems his most personal film, combining his interest in life beyond death with the requisite stunts and escapes (noticeably fewer in number this time) in its tale of a man found frozen in the wreck of a ship in the Arctic who is revived - initially because a lost and hungry member of another doomed expedition wants to eat him! - and brought back to civilisation a hundred years after his `death' where he finds the woman of his dreams reincarnated. She's being married at the time (literally - he interrupts the service) and he doesn't know it's the 20th century despite being driven to her house, so he ends up having to escape a lunatic asylum to help her find her missing father who's been lured away from the aforementioned Arctic expedition by her unscrupulous fiancé and is being kept locked in his animal laboratory under the stairs until he signs over his entire fortune. It's not half as entertaining as that makes it sound, and there's not much action either - an escape from a straightjacket and a padded cell and a brief bit of literal cliffhanging and a stunt with the girl in a canoe on the edge of Niagara Falls that was probably more dangerous to shoot than it looks on film. For most of the film, even in the shortened six-reel version that survives, it's pretty dull melodrama flatly played with particularly unconvincing plotting, though it's interesting to note the brief name-check to Arthur Conan Doyle in the last scene shortly before he and Houdini fell out.

If stunts were few and far between in The Man From Beyond, they're not even in the plural in his final film Haldane of the Secret Service, with only a lacklustre watermill escape providing the kind of stunt an audience attracted by Houdini's name would expect, which might explain why it sat on the shelf for a couple of years before a disappointing escape into theaters. Always fancying himself as a renaissance man and often describing himself as being foremost an inventor, his interest in criminology takes centre-stage in this Yellow Peril counterfeiting number that made use of stock footage Houdini shot of himself in various capital cities while on tour. Thus we see such exciting scenes as Houdini changing from a bus to a tram in Glasgow or climbing into a kiosk in Paris before cutting back to interior scenes as the intrepid secret service man on the trail of the gang of counterfeiters, narcotics and antiquities smugglers and monk impersonators who killed his father, constantly being sidetracked by Gladys Leslie who tells him a completely different story each time they meet, usually leading him into danger and thus causing him to believe she must be innocent. The plot's no more convincing than the master criminal's Oriental disguise (refreshingly the other Chinese roles are all played by Chinese actors) and, aside from swimming and climbing onto a departing liner, there's more talk than action, though Houdini's acting shows minor signs of improvement even if his other attempts at multi-tasking - he directed and produced as well - are not so successful. The best preserved and longest of any of his features, it's hard not to imagine that it's because the prints never got shown enough to get that damaged in the first place because of lack of interest...

More impressive is the mid-air stunt that is all that survives of Houdini's first feature The Grim Game. It's not actually Houdini climbing from one plane to another mid-air, but the collision between the two planes was real and, luckily, the sequence is well directed and edited. The disc also includes numerous short films of Houdini's public escapes that he incorporated in his stage act, as well as the `Metamorphosis' stunt performed by his brother Hardeen, a brief 1914 audio recording of Houdini introducing his Water Chamber `Invention,' a short French comedy probably inspired by Houdini, Slippery Jim, as well as stills and detailed production notes. All in all it's one of those packages where the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of the parts, at least as far as the films themselves go.

The surviving record of Houdini's dogged effort to become a matinee idol. Includes THE MASTER MYSTERY (1919), an entertaining incoherent serial with the first movie robot, plus TERROR ISLAND (1919), loopy THE MAN FROM BEYOND (1922), HALDANE OF THE SECRET SERVICE (1923) and thrilling fragment of THE GRIM GAME (1919). Houdini radiates charisma, delivers impressive stunts, can't act. Four chapters of the serial and two reels of TERROR ISLAND are missing, but collection quite watchable. Three-disc set includes excellent on-screen notes by Bret Wood, promotional shorts, brief recording of Houdini's voice, and a French short inspired by Houdini's feats. Rewarding.

As a person interested in Houdini and silent films, I found this DVD of interest. They did a great job of editing all the silent films available into one DVD Set. Many scenes or chapters of the serials that Houdini are no longer available, but the way it is handled by the makers of the DVD it doesn't distract from the enjoyment of the viewing. Even though his escapes could have been "faked" during filming, they were actually performed by Houdini in real time. But by todays standards, his "tricks and excapes" are weak. But as I am a fan of silent films and serials and an amateur magician, I found this this DVD interesting and enjoyable.
The bonus film tended to be boring since it was a collection of Houdini's strait jacket excapes. But for Houdini fans the DVD is a must.